Is this Barnes & Noble crazy or am I?

  • Thread starter Thread starter bengangmo
  • Start date Start date
BCHH said:
Of course, that's exactly what one would expect.



Is that the store's policy, or were you off following your own? Because I have received price adjustments at many stores like Best Buy, Wal Mart, Target, Kohl's, Penney's, Menard's, Home Depot and no doubt others. If it's not their official "policy" to grant price adjustments you'd never know it because I've not been denied an adjustment, nor been given any grief about it at any of those places.



Did you miss the part where the OP stated the clerk TOLD him (Nemo, just assuming, my apologies if I assumed incorrectly) after the sale the DVD's were going to be at an even better price the next week? Simply because you have a hard-on for people wanting to get the best value for their dollar, that doesn't make it wrong.

Perhaps you are making so much money that you can afford to give it away, and congratulations if that's the case, but keep in mind not everyone is so fortunate.
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Huh? Why so fierce?

Please remember I am not in the US, I have never worked in the US, nor in a big box store.

Where I worked, going from a 33% sale to a 50% sale meant less profit for the store.

But this is beside the point. OP Was happy with a 33% sale, bought the items, but later when heard he could get them cheaper wanted to return them, for no other reason than "now they're cheaper"

Where I come from, this is not right. Naturally people want to save money, and I hold no animosity at all towards OP for that.

Just that for me, I wouldn't do the return on the basis of "now they're cheaper than they were last week".

If they're the last title in the store, you can take you chances....
 
Little Nemo said:
But how does a hold benefit the store? They could sell it to me today or put a one day hold on it and hope I come back tomorrow and buy it. (I'm asking you rhetorically. I realize you're just mentioning this policy as a possibility not actually advocating it.)

I'll admit (before others point it out) that selling it to me might appear to have its uncertainties - the store could say they sold it to me once and I returned it so selling it to me is not a sure thing. But I think the circumstances made it clear that was an unusual situation and was not going to happen again. So why would the store want to forego a certain sale today for a possible sale tomorrow?
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Profit is the goal. It isn't just a sale. If they felt a hold for 24 hours or some other restriction helped prevent the "return and buy it again for less" thing then that speaks to bottem line. I've never heard of a policy like that though. Probably because any benifit would be far outweighed by customer ire and lost sales. I don't know what the hell I was thinking :o
 
hazel-rah said:
All DVDs purchased as part of the Buy 2 Get 1 Free promotion are nonrefundable. That won't be printed on the back of the receipt, but it's posted on signage in the department during the sale, and all the music employees are well aware of the policy. Exceptions are frequently made, however, as in your case. It's important to note here that allowing refunds in cases like yours is not an unofficial policy, it's an exception that we make for customers on a case-by-case basis. Some managers, such as mine, will almost always do it. Other managers I have known will never do it.

The refusal to let you repurchase the returned DVDs at 50% off makes absolutely no sense, and is not official B&N policy or something that I've ever heard of occurring before. It's inexplicable, and in my experience, stupid. I talked it over with my manager yesterday, in fact, and he thought it was stupid too.

It's probably worth mentioning that if you wait until after the 14-day period to try and do the return again, your chances of success will drop considerably.
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It's hard to enforce those exceptions when the return policy prints on the reciept and the exception doesn't. Customers rarely read signs completely and I wouldn't be surprised at all for a customer to come back for a refund because they sincerely didn't know.
I do find it hard to believe that nobody mentioned the no refund thing when the refund was asked for but employees vary. Still, once the refund is allowed, to refuse the resale was really stupid and lousy customer service.
 
Hampshire said:
Because like it or not, by doing this for you and others it encourages the behavior. It becomes one of the little loopholes customers exploit until it becomes a big loophole. Why bother selling DVDs at 30% off when all our customers that buy them bring them back when we run a 50% off sale to rebuy them? Solution, don't honor the sale on previous purchases.
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Not bloody likely. The 50% off sale has to run before the 14 day return policy expires. The customer has to know about the sale. It will happen, but not enough to become a big loophole.

I do think companies do have the "does not apply to previous purchases" disclaimer on sales flyers , or they used to. The problem is it's hard to enforce when you have conflicting return policies. That's why most major retailers have some sort of price gaurentee and will make the adjustment.
 
An update, in case anyone still cares.

I decided to try something different. Rather than take the DVD's back to the original store I had bought them from, I went to a different Barnes & Noble.

I explained what I wanted to the clerk in that video department - that I wanted to return the DVD's I had bought during the buy 2 get 1 free sale and buy them back under the current half off sale - and he said "Sure no problem." But then he hesitated and added "Well I better ask my manager but I don't think she'll have a problem with that."

So I went and got my DVD's and he called the manager over. She did not have any problem with it. All of my DVD's were returned and I then bought them back at the lower price. I even bought an extra one because I was happy. And a couple of CD's.

Huzzah!
 
The trick of buying the DVDs at 33% off and then returning them and rebuying when the 50% off sale begins is kind of pointless at Barnes and Noble because

A. The same DVDs are available during both sales for the entire duration of the sales, so if they don't have what you are looking for, you have plenty of time to order what you want. It only takes 3-5 days for special order DVDs to make it to the store, many times it's closer to 1-2 days.

B. You are allowed to reserve titles simply by calling and asking for them to be held in your name, so why go to the hassle of actually buying them and trying to return them? You can make reservations via the website as well.

Glad to hear everything worked out for you, Little Nemo! And I'm sorry about what happened the first time you tried.
 
And you forgot

C. It requires you to make two seperate trips to the store (or in my case three).

It's definitely not a plan you would set out to follow.
 
Little Nemo said:
Huzzah!
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Huzzah, indeed!

A blow for the little guy, the consumer, the ordinary nerd with common sense, armed only with a modicum of disposable income and a grasp of basic logic.

And if your victory annoys any n00bs here, or uptight middle managers at a bookstore, all the better.
 
And if your victory annoys any n00bs here, or uptight middle managers at a bookstore, all the better.
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hahaha, speaking as somebody with years of experience dealing with both middle managers and customers, it's customers who are by far the more uptight ones.
 
digs said:
Little Nemo said:
Huzzah!
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Huzzah, indeed!

A blow for the little guy, the consumer, the ordinary nerd with common sense, armed only with a modicum of disposable income and a grasp of basic logic.

And if your victory annoys any n00bs here, or uptight middle managers at a bookstore, all the better.
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A win-win for both sides IMO, since Little Nemo not only got his original DVD's for half-price, BN also sold a couple of extra items that Nemo might not have purchased originally.
 
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