Ever wanted to park in the handicapped spots but didn’t because of pesky laws and social norms? Well, if you place your online Circuit City order for pickup at the Cantonsville, Maryland store, you can! Reader Andy discovered that the store is flagrantly violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by using the handicapped spots as the special web order pickup zone. Andy then went inside and discovered that Circuit City ignores all kinds of policies, including their own price match guarantee.

I went by my local Circuit City in Catonsville, MD today trying to get a birthday gift for my dad and noticed something interesting in the parking lot. They had the sign telling people to park for online pickup in front of the row of handicap spots. They have the deal of your order being ready in 24 minutes or you get a $24 gift card. I guess that $24 gift card would come in handy after you pay the $98 fine posted for illegally parking in the handicap spot itself. I looked around, this was the only sign they had for online pickup.

Anyway, thought you might find this interesting. By the way, along with this disregard of the ADA, I also had a nice experience of Circuit City failing to follow their own 110% price match “guarantee”. They were selling an external hard drive for $70 more than I had seen 15 minutes earlier, less than a mile away, but they would only offer to match the price and not give the extra 10% because 1) the price difference was “too much” (170 vs. 100) and 2) I had “seen the other price first”. According to the manager, if I had bought the drive at CC first, then seen the other price, he’d give me the 10%. Unfortunately he refused to even look at the CC price match policy even though I had pulled it up for him on one of their laptops 2 feet away from him. For the record, their policy is “Find a lower advertised price from another local store with the same item in stock, and we’ll gladly beat their price by 10% of the difference.” Well, they didn’t “gladly” do that at all. And in fact, if I had purchased it at CC first, I would have been ineligible for the extra 10% because “Plus, if you see a lower advertised price within 30 days of your purchase with us, we’ll refund 100% of the difference.”

It became a matter of principle and it would have been a measly $7 that could have kept a customer. It also would have earned them over $200, because not only did they lose one sale on the hard drive (since I decided to give my business to the other store), but they lost a second sale on my father’s gift too.

Who is training these managers?

Keep up the good work.
-Andy

p.s. For the record, I’m not leaving my dad hanging. I got his gift somewhere else. 🙂

Don’t hesitate to call the corporate office when a store refuses to honor its price match policy. In this case, you could have also threatened to call the police to report the asinine web order pickup zones if they didn’t honor the price match policy, only to call anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

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