Julia writes:

Last weekend, my holiday spirit was crushed as I was taking a leisurely shopping stroll through a Dallas mall and I wanted to share the story with you all…

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Julia continues:

“I went into a local Teavana store to purchase some gourmet tea as a holiday present for my grandparents. The salesgirl there told me that if I got 16 oz. of tea. I would get a 10% discount. This sounded like a pretty good deal, so I ordered enough tea to get to the discount, which came out to around $62 total. When I got my receipt, I saw that there was only 90 CENTS taken as a discount. This is the point when the sales manager, Dwayne, got involved. He first asked the salesgirl whether she administered the 10% discount after every tea (which it turned out, she did not. The $.90 discount was only taken off of the last item, which was $8.99). At this point, I hadn’t figured this out yet, so I sort of let his question to the salesgirl go. On the other hand, at this point Dwayne must have known that the receipt was calculated incorrectly.

This is the point in the customer service experience when any other high-end store clerk would stop, apologize, listen to my question and recalculate the receipt. But not Dwayne. After several times of me trying to explain to him that any way you look at the receipt, 90 cents does not a 10% discount make, I realized that he actually didn’t care about what calculation made sense. What he cared about was that the register calculated a certain discount and what the cash register calculates goes.

At this time, I said that the discount that was sold to me was not the real deal being offered and that I wanted to return the product. Dwayne told me that the item is unreturnable because it is a food product – something that is stated on their receipts. How I was supposed to know that before buying something and getting the receipt is beyond me.

I pointed out that I was buying a gourmet food product for $60 not from a computer but from a thinking person that is supposed to provide me with the appropriate level of customer service and Dwayne countered with the suggestion that the customer service that he is willing to provide me with is to do nothing.

I have taken down Dwayne’s first and last name, the phone number to the corporate office, and the name of Dwayne’s manager. Honestly, it’s not even about the $5 of discount that I didn’t get. Teavana and Dwayne took my holiday spirit and stomped on it. My jollitude, festiviness and cheeriosity suffered a crushing fate that day.

Teavana has a bunch of stores across the country. Anyone else experience this atrocious customer service from these guys?”

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