No Receipt May Mean Unhappy Returns
Even as they buy Christmas gifts, many shoppers worry about theirs being returned. With the tags removed, stores may not accept the merchandise. With no receipt, they may refund less than was paid.
Either practice may be justifiable, but not always fair. With no receipt--normal circumstance with gifts--stores don’t really know if something was bought for $50 before Christmas or for $29.99 the very day it was returned, so they credit only that day’s price. But who wants to spend $50 on someone and have the value of their gift reduced at the return counter?
Customers are not without recourse. But they need to clarify a store’s policy when they buy and, if necessary, insist that their gift include some notation that will guarantee a return at equal value.
Given today’s economy, the problem may be intensified this year. Desperate retailers may be lowering prices several times before the final return and will be reluctant to change their practice of crediting the lowest price. For their part, consumers may return and exchange more gifts than ever--one marketing survey estimated that 43% of Christmas gifts came back last year--preferring to turn everything possible into cash or something they need more.
Since neither gift returns nor after-Christmas markdowns are anything new, stores should by now have developed ways of determining exactly what was spent and should therefore be credited. It may, of course, be more profitable to keep it indistinct. Indeed, gift return policies seem even less clear now than ever. Salespeople and corporate managers alike don’t always know them.
Getting stores to accept merchandise as theirs is usually not a problem, even without recognizable wrappings. Some will even take non-exclusive brand items: “We will accept anything we sell,” says Jo Lawley, the Broadway’s senior vice president of marketing and sales promotion.
Some go even further. Nordstrom’s stated policy is to take the customer’s word. By way of illustration, Nordstrom officials like to tell of the customer who brought in some tires, insisting that they had come from Nordstrom: Nordstrom took them back. (A good story, but just try it.)
What they’ll give in return is another question. Posted return policies usually offer cash refunds only for goods with receipts, within certain time limits. Given no receipts, many stores offer only exchanges, or--like the Limited, Toys R Us, Saks Fifth Ave.--store credits, or even special store scrip.
Others don’t care, finding it more efficient to offer everyone refunds, usually in the form of a check mailed later. It’s also “good advertising to have an extremely liberal return policy,” says Joseph B. Siegel, vice president of merchandising for the National Retail Federation. “That’s how department stores grew.”
By contrast, small retail stores don’t readily give refunds--to anyone, with or without receipt. Whatever their reasons--tight cash flow, tight inventories or in Siegel’s view, “shortsightedness”--they discourage some potential gift-buyers, who don’t want to limit their recipient’s options.
More annoying to some consumers is their gift’s possible loss of value between purchase and return. Most stores say that, without a receipt, they have no choice but to credit or refund only the current price at time of return--which is likely to be less, and never more, than the pre-Christmas price. Otherwise, someone out to cheat a store could wrap up something bought at an after-Christmas sale and claim that it was bought at full price before Christmas.
Many stores nevertheless just trust the customer. “If they say it was a Christmas gift,” says a customer service representative at the Limited, “they’ll get the before-Christmas price.” It’s a matter of “merchandising strategy,” says a Target spokesman: “If you make the customer happy, that builds loyalty.”
But it doesn’t seem necessary for stores either to rest on trust or to risk cheating their customers. They can come up with a system of determining most purchase prices. Nordstrom’s salespeople are supposed to note (in code) the store, salesperson and price on every tag or box. The Broadway’s salespeople are supposed to note store, salesperson, date, and a code for sale or regular price.
Chicago-based Marshall Field has an even better system: New cash registers prompt salespeople to ask if something is a gift, and if so, they produce a gift receipt to go in the box, noting date, store, salesperson and coded price.
Even at stores with no such systems, consumers can demand similar notations--at least the date and location. That’s customer service, modern-style.
