Roger is stuck with some clothes that relatives bought him for Christmas that don’t fit. Did these relatives cut the tags off? Buy him shirts from an obscure store with only a few locations? No. The shirts come from Kmart, which has so much trouble remembering its own recent inventory that they’ve deleted all trace of this recent merchandise from their systems and can’t take the shirts back.

I thought I’d forward you my lovely email exchange I had with Kmart about my dilemma regarding gifts from Kmart.

I received a couple of shirts as gifts from my family over the Christmas holiday, however the shirts were too large that I couldn’t possibly wear them without swimming inside of them so I tried to exchange them for something smaller that I could definitely use.

I went to the store and the store told me that the “barcode” information shows that it doesn’t exist in the system and could not determine a price.

Then I contact Kmart Customer Service via email and they told me I could not even exchange them without a receipt–even when the clothing was purchased at Kmart, had the original tags still attached to the articles, and was obviously a gift.

But my problem happens to be two-fold. Inability to exchange a “gift” item for something usable like a similar item or store credit and the incompetence of Kmart email customer support.

The incompetence of Kmart/Sears customer support will make me never shop there and simply advocate to others to shop elsewhere–hint: Walmart. The email exchanges below shows differing advice and explanations to solve the problem that I repeatedly explain four times over within the past week.

The other option I can do is donate my unusable gift shirts to someone who can better use them. Way to go Kmart!

Roger’s long and fruitless correspondence with Kmart shows two things: first, Kmart’s employees don’t closely read their e-mails. Second, the return policy is restrictive enough, even for gifts, that it’s a bad idea to buy anyone a gift at Kmart unless you subsequently staple the receipt to their forehead.

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