In Buying, Insist on a Good Return Policy
No store wants returns, but a good return policy is good business.
Ask the man who brought several books back to a children’s bookstore in Los Angeles, having misread his wife’s shopping list. Since he’d paid cash, he asked for a cash refund, but was told he had to take a merchandise credit. Ask another customer who changed her mind right at the counter after making a purchase, but was told that it couldn’t be voided. She too had to take a credit.
“Our policy,” the owner later explained, “is no refunds for cash, even with a receipt. Of course, if someone insists, if they stand here and scream, we’ll give them a refund.”
This is a policy? If you scream, you get a refund?
Sure gives new meaning to the phrase consumer demand. But then, service isn’t always supplied. We either demand it, or we self-serve. We find our own goods, hunt up missing prices, find the errors in our accounts, provide the corrections, make sure they’re corrected.
So whoever wants a certain return practice must insist, preferably at the time of purchase, and may the best bully win.
Christmas is a good time to start. This is the season of commerce--rapid, often desperate buying, followed by unusual numbers of returns. It’s also a time of rapid price cuts as D-Day approaches, then passes, and what’s left must be cleared out, at a much lower price than it bore before Christmas.
What’s more, the post-Christmas returner was probably not the purchaser and therefore has no receipt. With rare exceptions (such as the store above), “you do a lot better with a receipt,” says Barbara Opotowsky, president of the Better Business Bureau of Metropolitan New York.
There are state and municipal laws on return policies, mostly just disclosure requirements. Store policy, whatever it is, must be disclosed, fully and conspicuously. Some keep it simple: New York City, for example, requires posting, period. Any store that doesn’t post return policy must provide a cash refund or charge credit, depending on the manner of purchase, on anything returned with receipt within 20 days.
California, another example, retains the idea of disclosure but reverses the emphasis. Any store that doesn’t offer cash, credit and/or exchange on most goods returned with receipt within seven days must post its policy, including the conditions for each--time period, type of merchandise, etc. But retailers who do offer one or another of those options needn’t post anything, including conditions for each.
The result is some uncertainty over what a receipt gets one--the problem at the children’s bookstore, for instance. One may have to fight for a cash refund--particularly at smaller stores, which sometimes seem more eager to hang on to a sale than a customer. At least the receipt obviates arguments over date of purchase and price.
Note that these laws focus on goods with receipts--not the usual Christmas problem. Few people enclose sales slips with gifts. And no receipt usually means credit or exchange, not refund, assuming that the store can at least identify something as theirs--by tag or card or wrapping paper.
The big problem isn’t identification but value, which keeps going down in the pre-Christmas sales and sinks further after Christmas. Most Christmas gifts were therefore priced higher when bought than when they’re returned. This means that stores could give back less than they got or that some cheat could gift-wrap something bought at an after-Christmas sale and claim that it was a pre-Christmas purchase.
To guard against being ripped off by a relatively few people, many stores routinely rip off hordes of people. Standard policy (often posted) on gifts returned without receipts is credit only, but (and this is rarely posted) credit only for the price at the time of return. Without a receipt, who knows when they were bought?
This is not hard to solve. Some stores have already found a way. They write the date and sales clerk’s number on a sticker inside the box or on the back of the tag. Some add coded price, but the date is enough: Electronic registers or printed price lists can supply the applicable price immediately.
Unfortunately, few stores do this--an obvious way to avoid taking unfair advantage, among other things. Nordstrom stores do it all the time, on all tags, as much for security purposes and the tracking of sales commissions as for fairness to customers.
Some do it only on certain items, often gift china and glassware boxed right in the department. Some do it only in certain circumstances, perhaps only when an item goes to custom gift-wrapping.
Some stores tried it and gave it up. The Broadway stores’ sales clerks put their ID numbers and the date on all tags for about a year, through Christmas ’90. But, says Mary Mumolo, senior manager for consumer relations, customers didn’t like it “because of the time factor. They want to get in and out as fast as possible.”
This too is easily solved. Leave it to the customers.
Under the immortal rule stated above--whoever-screams-gets-a-refund--they can just order clerks to write date, ID number, even a policy (“refund with receipt”) on the tag, the box, a card or, if necessary, a bookmark.
