People who shop on black friday really irk me. They have concepts of what should be a perfect shopping experience on the busiest day of the year, that are lightyears away from reality. They expect stock of a sales item hours after a store has opened. They expect rain checks on items that are clearly 100% margin loss, days later. Most of all, they expect to be treated like gods.
I’m sorry, when you treat me decently, then I’ll treat you like a god. Until then, go shop at Circuit City, they have great customer service (yea ok).
So, other than having just worked black friday morning where we did more than a normals day’s business in 45mins of opening, browsing the web I find this article about a guys experience shopping at a Staples. On Black Friday. I feel like I must take the article to task piece by piece, for the simple fact that its just plain wrong and it does harm to Staples for no real reason.
To begin with, he states that he was attempting to buy the Samsung 2010 laser printer that some stores were carrying as a promotional item. It’s a pretty we’ve been carrying for months, and in general stores don’t stock except for special occasions (ie, sales). His store was carrying it for $139 (ours for example, is $129 but we were selling a different model for the same sales price) with a massive $100 rebate. Pretty good price, in fact, I bought one a few months ago for that price myself.
Thing is though, he’s under the impression that no ones going to buy it because of the initial price, and the rebate amount. Wrong, they sell like hotcakes. Whether its the Lexmark, Konica Minolta, Samsung, or HP entry-level laser on sale, they will sell very quickly at that price; we sold seven within an hour of opening.
His comment about not being able to find the page on Staples website, whether sales flyer or that particular printer isn’t clearly defined but both are explainable. The Samsung 2010 is typically in store only. There are quite a few items that arent listed online but, for promotions, we carry in store. The flyer itself wasn’t released until wed. evening though it was accessible in other locations.
In regards to stock of the item, if a store had seven units to sell, thats all they had. Black Friday specials we are not allowed to transfer, or even attempt to contact other stores. The simple reason is volume. We get slammed, even with all the stores employees on the floor and the inventory system can’t track sales updates from other stores that quickly. If you show up 20 minutes after the stores open, its pretty damn likely that all the good items are gone. Its not because we didnt stock “enough,” but because those people at the doors at 4 a.m. (15 at our store, and by 5:30 there was over 100) bought everything. The flyers clearly list “limited stock.” Hell, two stores in the same district might not even carry the same items. Carlisle and Camp Hill had two different monitors on sale, for two different prices.
As to the associate being rude, I’m sorry, but on black friday there are few “happy” associates. We’re slammed, dealing with as many as 1,500 customers when stores might normally only get 500 in a day. We have people trying to cheat the system, steal (we had three attempted thefts on FREE items by 7 a.m.!), and treating us like shit. Do you really expect us to dive to the floor and give you phone numbers when they’re listed in the phone book, or under the #411 system when we have so many other people to service? Come on a regular day, and see how we do. There’s a reason why we’re the number one Office Supply company and it’s because of our customer service.
In closing, there’s no conspiracy. There’s no bait-and-switch. You tried to buy a hot item on a massive sales day. Don’t try and get up page hits by inflammatory articles.
This might not be the most well written article in the world, but I was up at 4 a.m. and gotta be back at 2. So there it is. Jonas, if you read this and have any questions about staples, feel free to comment back