Retail: Doing Returns

How much will someone fight to get the correct price on something? At what point do you say, I think I can live with that price. At what point do you say, Hey maybe I am not eligible for that discount?

A couple of scenarios... I take in a custom framing order for a diploma from a very attractive and obviously successful girl. She likes what I have designed and is agreeable to the 40% off discount that the store is running. Then, after I have printed out the order and finalized everything, her mom comes in and says that she has a 50% off coupon that has expired. Now the reason why she could not have used the coupon while the promotion was running was because she was on a cruise in Europe. EUROPE. Surprisingly I was rather nice to this woman and her ugly daughter. Yeah thats right, she because ugly as soon as she became greedy. The manger gave her the extra 10% which ended up being a ten to fifteen dollar difference. So the question still stands. Why does the fact that you were on vacation an excuse for not being eligible for the discount?

Another scenario... a woman buys 200 packages beads and other craft items at $0.59 each. The grand total for the purchases is $118.00. Once she is fully wrung up and pays for everything she remembers that she has a tax exception form. Now the way the registers work, and for audit purposes, one can not just void a cash transaction. The person at the customer service desk must do a complete return of each item. Scanning 200 pieces the first time was bad because the customer service clerk had to manually adjust the price of the receipt. When someone does a return they have to manually adjust the price of each individual item. Once everything was returned and then repurchased, which took well over an hour and a half the woman saved $9.27.

Let us think about this in a mathematical sense. I believe the average Joanns worker earns somewhere in the vicinity of $8.00/hour. If you figure that EVERYONE in the whole tax paying world gets paid more than that the numbers become easier. Someone who earns $50,000.00 and only works forty hour work weeks for fifty-two weeks earns $24.00/hour. So it would stand to reason that if you do make 50k you would consider that your time IS worth $24.00/hour. Now let us say that I make $10.00/hour at Joanns. So if am doing something such us washing my dress shirts and dress pants I would think about that financially. One must ignore the fact that I would not be wearing dress shirts at Joanns because it is not that kind of place. If washing three loads of laundry, which includes washing, drying, and ironing takes approximately 3.1/2 hours I can put a monetary value to that. That means that financially the act of washing my shirts is worth $35.00. So if I can pay someone to do that for me and it costs me less than $35.00 I would say it is a financially astute transaction.

So that is what gets me about the whole return I was talking about was that according to my time/payment argument the lady is only worth $6.18/hour. Is it just me or is it the principle of the matter. Why is it that when someone really want their money back they forget that the argument is not worth the price? Or maybe next time she should just mention all her discounts before the matter.


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