Year: 2008

I hate get­ting my eyes examined, which is why I only sub­mit to it every two years or so. Since part of the reas­on I go is to make sure that any symp­toms of glauc­oma or mac­u­lar degen­er­a­tion are found, I get the full check-up, involving hor­rible chem­ic­als to dilate the pupils. These, of course, affect my vis­ion, so I can­’t drive home after­wards; for­tu­nately the walk is only about 25 minutes each way, so it’s not too big a deal.

As I was walk­ing home I real­ised I must have looked more than a little weird in my jeans and a non­des­cript winter coat, with a floppy sun­hat pulled down around my face to min­im­ize the light get­ting into my stressed eyes, des­pite the cloud. Not that any­one seemed to notice of course, this being Vancouver.

It’s always nice to have a good cus­tom­er ser­vice exper­i­ence; not that I expec­ted oth­er­wise in this case. And when it shows a good way to use a cus­tom­er­’s per­son­al inform­a­tion, so much the better.

What happened was, we had a dis­play case built into our din­ing room wall. I stained it and var­nished it, and wanted glass shelves. To cut a very long story short, the holes in the walls for the shelves were the wrong size for the shelf sup­ports I wanted, and I got vari­ous things from Lee Val­ley to try to get the sup­ports I wanted to fit in the holes. That did­n’t work, so I ended up with oth­er shelf sup­ports and a bunch of stuff I did­n’t need any more, that was unused apart from a “try it out” test run on one support. 

Fast for­ward two years or so; when you have a baby who does­n’t sleep well, return­ing stuff with­in the three-month dead­line does­n’t always hap­pen. So I called up today and asked if I could return it any­way, even though I’d lost the receipt. The woman on the phone said to come in and talk to the sales per­son (Lee Val­ley does not have self-ser­vice — they have show­rooms and cata­logues and you talk to a real per­son about what you want and wheth­er it will work, and they fetch the items for you out of the back room). So I did that at lunch­time today. Explained to the guy what had happened, gave him my cus­tom­er account num­ber, and he dis­ap­peared into the back room to look up when I’d bought the stuff and how much I’d paid for it, so he could do a full refund (no restock­ing charges, yay!). It turned out that some of the stuff was from 2 years ago, the rest from 2002 — but they still refun­ded what I’d paid, cheerfully. 

Yep, they know where I live and what I buy, and they use that inform­a­tion to send me cata­logues on related sub­jects, and to give me refunds 6 years after I bought the stuff and lost the receipt. That’s a reas­on­able trade-off to me, and good cus­tom­er ser­vice to boot. Of course, I promptly bought anoth­er couple of use­ful items — I defy any­one to go into their show­room and not find some­thing use­ful for house, work­shop, or garden. So their reas­on­able policy also has bene­fits for them.