(Yo Spiff)
In all the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping, we’re surprised we don’t hear more about shoppers accidentally losing a bag of items they just purchased. But when that happens, is the store responsible for the shopper’s forgetfulness?
This is the question Consumerist reader J. puts to us all in the following letter:
I am a retail manager and I had an incident the other day where a man called saying he needed to speak with my supervisor. I am the store manager here and my immediate supervisor — a district manager — does not work on site with me.
Wanting to to fix the issue myself (knowing how busy DMs can be during the holidays) I asked if I could help him. He said he had purchased some items on black Friday and that he had put the bag down somewhere in the store and forgotten them. He also said he had been calling us repeatedly trying get this resolved since black Friday and no one had returned his calls.
I run a very small crew and after questioning all of my employees, I don’t feel that this happened at my location. None of them knew anything about it. I passed his info to my DM who called him the following day.
Come to find out it was not my location, and being that the items had been bought and paid for, then he lost them on his own accord, we didn’t feel we were responsible for replacing them.
He then took his complaint all the way up to the CEO of the company and was awarded the value of the items in a gift card, which I had to give him since he swore it was my store, though none of the employees he named as people he spoke to work at my location.
The problem I have with this is that he lost the product. It wasn’t that we didn’t give it to him, he was handed his items and then he lost them. Should we have replaced them? I don’t believe so. At what point does “the customer’s always right” not apply?
J. tells us the total retail value of the items for which he had to reimburse the shopper was $130, in case that makes a difference in what you think about this situation.
Regardless, have your say on the matter in the following poll:
More From Consumerist
-
Aetna Says Doctor Made Billing Error, But The Patient Is The One Who Owes $6K For MRI
-
L.A. Sues U.S. Bank For Letting Foreclosures Fall Into Disrepair
-
United Airlines Now Responsible For One-In-Three Consumer Complaints
-
Americans Are More Responsible With Credit Cards Than We’ve Been In A Decade
-
How Do Different Credit & Debit Cards Stack Up In Terms Of Consumer Protection?
I had a DM who did this all the time…I nicknamed him – to his face – “cave”. Cuz he always caved in to the customer demands no matter how redonkulous.
A lot of credit cards have 90 day purchase protection that would cover this exact situation. It’s basically stupid insurance, and it’s free. If the customer was aware of the options available to him, that would have worked for him.
I had a friend once who worked at Toys R Us. A guy bought one of those plastic toddler playhouses and just tossed it in the back of his truck without tying it down or securing it in any way. He then left & got on the highway where a big gust of wind combined with his speed cause it to promptly blow away & get destroyed. The idiot went back to the store & actually had the gall to demand another one. They laughed in his face, telling him that once he paid for it, its his responsibility, not theirs, which was what the store in question here should have done to the jerk in the article.
The American attitude of entitlement has grown WAY out of control.
Speaking as a forgetful dumbass, I don’t ever expect other people to make up for my dumbassery. I think corporate probably did the expedient thing keeping this person happy, given the power of social media, but ethically, they had no obligation to do so.
Aside from a stated retail value of the items, there’s no mention of any evidence that the “shopper” ever purchased any items, much less lost them. And even if the shopper’s claim is true, the store si under no obligation to replace items purchased and subsequently lost by the customer.
Like usual many people don’t like to take responsibility for there own mistakes or actions. Another reasons we have so many frivolous lawsuits in this country.
Who bagged the items? If the cashier was responsible for the bagging, the store is not only responsible but from the stand point of “will this customer ever come back,” there better be something worth the aggravation.
Right before thanksgiving, I was bagging groceries while my wife paid. I left a bag behind with about $15 worth of goods. When we noticed about an hour later, my wife drove back to the store and asked about the bag. No one had reported it, but they replaced the groceries anyway. I thought that was more than was needed because I expected the next shopper to speak up and say “hey, someone left their groceries” and the bag would be placed at the customer service desk. That wasn’t the case. I was fine with re-buying the groceries if they didn’t have the bag as it was MY mistake. Either way, I’m impressed with that store because I have heard great things about them, by never experienced them myself. It’s a regional chain in the PNW, and they have the best beer selection out of any store in Spokane.
“The customer is always right” stops at matters of taste – if you want a suit cut like that one, but in orange and chartreuse paisley, well, the customer is always right. If you say that a $10 coupon combines with a 10% off coupon to be 100% off because 10*10 = 100 and “the customer is always right,” then you’re a blight on society and I don’t want to be in the checkout line behind you.
Dont really understand what the problem is? He was forgetful and lost something on his own accord. noone took anything from him. He didnt give it to the bag checker and it vanished. another moron trying to blame someone else for his stupidity. when the store refunded him the value, they set a president for all other stores to follow suit. Now everyone will expect this. Not good for anyone, really.
This smells like a scam to me, the company I work for had someone try to pull this scam on several of our local stores. Their story kept changing every time they talked to a manager so no one ever got away with anything.
A strange incident happened to me at Target a few months back, I was being rung out and at the end of my transaction I paid and waited for my boyfriend to check out who was behind me. I was using a reusable shopping back and for some reason I just happened to look through it at my items and noticed one of my items (some hair product I believe) was not in the bag.
I paid for it and it was on my receipt but it just disappeared. It was incredibly strange and I brought it to the cashier’s attention to see if she dropped it or if it fell out on the other side of the register where I couldn’t see it, but no, it was just totally gone. I had to ask the cashier if I could go get another one, she was really unhelpful. She just let me go get one and that was it. I don’t know what in the world happened there, if there’s a blackhole by that register or if she decided to pocket the product but now I always check my bags before leaving Target.
When I worked at Wallyworld, merchandise was sometimes left in the bagging area. If I could catch the shopper, I would. If not, SOP was to take the items to customer service and fill out the forgotten bag form. If the customer called or went to customer service and asked, s/he would be given the products or store credit.
That seems to me to be the limit of the store obligation.
The store when above and beyond unnecessarily. Chalk it up to a life lesson – “Don’t leave things in the store after you’ve bought them.” It’s a mistake this person would only make once.
If only we had J. Walter Weatherman to teach this guy a lesson…
I’ve wondered this about the following scenario: What if you buy something, then immediately after purchasing it another shopper runs into you and you drop the bag, breaking what you just bought. Technically, you already bought it, so the store’s not at fault and potentially has no responsibility to replace the items. But would you expect them to? For whatever reason, I probably would.
Yet conversely, if you walk past a shelf, knock something off and it breaks, you probably don’t expect the store to charge you for it. I probably wouldn’t.
In this situation since another customer was at fault, ideally the other customer who ran into you should reimburse you for the broken item. But yes I agree most of us would expect the store to refund you, including me. This had nothing to do with the store, and the store cannot control the action of customers, the incident was an accident that just so happened to happen in the store.. Now you may be able to return the merchandise the next day as broken depending on the stores return policy and the type of merchandise and if you have the receipt.
I am a school teacher, and this is like making the school responsible if a student loses his lunch money on the playground. Should the school be liable for the $? No. Should the student accept responsibility for not keeping track of their own lunch $? Yes. The store did nothing wrong, it wasn’t even the right store, and the manager was BULLIED into giving this guy free stuff. That is just wrong.
Customer’s fault, the store went way beyond, etc.
But what would make it simply poetic would be if one of the lost items were an as-seen-on-TV Showtime Rotisserie.
Set it and forget it!
Yes, hello. I’d like to speak with your Sales Manager. Oh, you are? Well I was in your dealership last week and purchased a 2011 Ford Mustang. Oddly enough, I can’t find it. I know I bought it, but I seem to have misplaced it. I’d like it replaced, please and thank you.
Sorry, that’s not how things work. I’d love to find out what company “J.” works for because I’d patron the hell out of it. Only his particular location, though, seeing as how he appears to be the only one with his head on straight.
There’s a difference between keeping the customer happy and caving to ridiculous requests.
“I set my child down and now she’s gone. YOU OWE ME ANOTHER CHILD!!!”
I have a ridiculous paranoia about being robbed when I am walking to and from the car when I am shopping, or perhaps not so ridiculous depending on how you look at it. I have heard stories on several forums about people being robbed for small electronics, something I buy frequently from retail stores. I now buy from Amazon or Newegg since it gets delivered to my door and if it doesn’t make it then they are responsible for getting it to me or giving me a refund. I also usually get a better price than a store.
The paranoia also has to do with how a few stores are set up here, there is one store in particular that is next to a seedy hotel and you have to walk on the side of it to get to the front door, the only parking is in the back of the store. There is no other entrance. It just seems pretty easy for someone to be hiding back there ready to grab expensive purchases from someone.
You definitely have to watch your purse here though, because snatchings are common, I never shop alone though, and 99% of the time the shoppers that are targeted are alone.
I never used to leave packages in stores, then I took an arrow to the knee.
By the same reason that stores can’t search your shopping bags after you pay for an item: BY LAW, once you pay for a purchase, it is your property and you don’t have to prove you own it.
If you were just leaving a cash register after paying and someone grabbed your bag and ran, they would be stealing from YOU and not the store. However, in that case, the store might feel sympathy for you and replace your purchase cause it happened in front of everyone. But if you bought something, then lost it somewhere, and have no way to prove that it was in this store, where in the store, or even IF YOU’D BOUGHT ANYTHING TO BEGIN WITH, the store has no obligation to help you.
Think of it this way. Doesn’t matter when you bought something. Could have been just now, or years ago. If I were in a store, set my hat down somewhere, wandered around the store, and couldn’t find it again, I wouldn’t demand that the store replace my hat.
Having said that, props to the company for putting customer service first, even if it wasn’t really deserved.
Hell no the store, especially yours should of had to reimburse him other then goodwill.
He was already caught lying about locations.
More then likely he was a scammer. Anything other then cash would have a tracable method. If he could trace it, the ustomer would know he is blaming the wrong location.
The manager should of gave the ceo more information instead of what the customer was.
Unless the ceo did it for goodwill and hoping the customer spends the money instore himself. Personally, I am betting he sells the giftcard for cash.
Hell no the store, especially yours should of had to reimburse him other then goodwill.
He was already caught lying about locations.
More then likely he was a scammer. Anything other then cash would have a tracable method. If he could trace it, the ustomer would know he is blaming the wrong location.
The manager should of gave the ceo more information instead of what the customer was.
Unless the ceo did it for goodwill and hoping the customer spends the money instore himself. Personally, I am betting he sells the giftcard for cash.
Restaurant responsible for bird pooping in your food…
Store responsible for stuff a dumb ass lost somewhere after buying it…
Are we serious? What is next? Store responsible for washing somebody’s pants because he crapped them while shopping at the store?
I accidentally left one bag at Walmart when leaving the checkout. I got home and realized I was missing several items. I drove back, told a cashier, we all looked around for it, couldn’t find it. I showed the manager my receipt and told her what was missing. About $100 worth of stuff. She told me to just go get the items and take them home. I don’t know if that’s store policy or what, but she really made my day, and it sure provides good will.
My wife has done this about 4 times at Wally World. The cashiers bag your items on that little carousel then expect you to put them in the cart, then the cashiers get busy talking to customers or coworkers and forget to turn the carousel. Then, no one notices until the shopper is gone.
Do you want to be right and lose future business or write it off as the cost of doing business and ensure that you keep the customer happy? Why is this so hard to understand?
It’s like most things in life, it’s not always best to be right. This is in reference to interactions with:
1) Significant other
2) Boss
3) Customer
4) Wait staff
5) Police officers
6) Jurors
Yes, you might technically be correct in your stance, but it could cause you to:
1) Break up
2) Get fired
3) Lose the customer for life
4) Have your food abused
5) Be fined for all the little things most cops let go, or be harassed within the powers granted by law
6) Lose any sympathy you may have had, thereby sealing your own fate of a convinction (when guilty of course, but maybe on that thin edge between guilty by the letter of the law and guilty by the spirit of the law).
So no, it’s not the store’s responsibility to pay for the items, but are you willing to risk what it takes to be right?