Anyway

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.

I see that Paul Ked­rosky is talk­ing about a resur­gence of depart­ment stores, based on the fact that lots of people want one-stop shop­ping rather than going from store to store. Fun­nily enough, Wal­mart has been meet­ing pre­cisely this need for years; I gath­er one of the major demo­graph­ics for Wal­mart is har­ried moth­ers with chil­dren in tow who also don’t want to schlep from store to store. Now, if depart­ment stores would actu­ally make it more pleas­ant to shop in them, and more effi­cient, they’d get more of my busi­ness as well. Effi­ciency to me means a reas­on­able selec­tion of products, not only cloth­ing, organ­ised in a way that means I can find what I’m look­ing for (or find out they don’t have it) in a short peri­od of time. People to help in the pro­cess would be a def­in­ite plus, but some logic in where things are would make up for that. Rolling carts for people push­ing strollers or bug­gies would help as well.