Whilst I appreciate we all have bad days and you never know what is going on in somebody’s life, I think if you bring that to work in a retail environment then you are in the wrong industry!
Mistakes happen, but any half decent company would offer a refund or some form of solution rather than being rude to the customer. I would be complaining in writing personally
Well said @pansyface! The general public can be very difficult and as nobody is a saint it can be impossible to be permanently cheerful.
If I bought a rose wrongly labelled from David Austin I would expect a refund but from B&Q I would be happy if it was healthy. You pay your money and you get your choice.
The OP referred to vulnerable people not sure what was meant by that. I think most of us would tailor our response to the complaint and the person making it.
Try getting a refund from a French nursery from Spain when your order is short or they send the wrong plants, especially when you don’t speak French and have to rely on email/google translate. Impossible, they just ignore your emails! I have less opportunity to vote with my feet since local plant selection is poor.
Mountainous Northern Catalunya, Spain. Hot summers, cold winters.
Well said @pansyface! The general public can be very difficult and as nobody is a saint it can be impossible to be permanently cheerful.
If I bought a rose wrongly labelled from David Austin I would expect a refund but from B&Q I would be happy if it was healthy. You pay your money and you get your choice.
The OP referred to vulnerable people not sure what was meant by that. I think most of us would tailor our response to the complaint and the person making it.
By the vulnerable people I meant, if they speak to me like that, I can take it and seek another way to raise my complaint. If the customer is an elderly person with limited access to internet, and/or if £10 is really a lot of money to them, what kind of experience would it be to be dealt with like that? If the staff member only targeted me for whatever reason (I was never rude to them to start with. I calmly presented them with my evidence, and hadn't even mentioned my request yet), and they are much nicer to other customers, that's a different matter. Judging by the online review of that store, it doesn't seem to be the case.
And you don't need to be cheerful really, just being reasonable is good enough. When I asked for returns/refunds of other faulty products from other retailers before, nobody ever requested me "please prove the faulty water tap you installed is the same one you bought from our store", or "please prove that the plant is really missing from the delivered order". Because it's difficult if not impossible to prove to start with, and then why would a big retailer assume that customers are trying to scam it all the time?
I wouldn't say £9-10 isn't that cheap anyway from the likes of B&Q. I have bought similar, but more substantial roses for the same price or cheaper from my local garden centre, where they have no doubt been better looked after.
Agreed we can't all have our choice of jobs, but nobody is saying you need to be cheerful to customers all day every day, but there is a difference between being artificially cheerful and being rude (which it sounds like they were if the OPs description is an accurate one.) Im rather surprised at how many people have such low expectations of service from such a big retailer. Regardless of how much the product cost, if you buy something which is described as one thing and turns out to be another I think you have every right to ask them to remedy it, and Id be very surprised if anyone higher up the hierarchy than the person who dealt with it would condone it being dealt with as it was
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This is noble maiden a white lupin! I got it from a reputable source but these things happen and I think it’s very pretty.
In the sticks near Peterborough
And you don't need to be cheerful really, just being reasonable is good enough. When I asked for returns/refunds of other faulty products from other retailers before, nobody ever requested me "please prove the faulty water tap you installed is the same one you bought from our store", or "please prove that the plant is really missing from the delivered order". Because it's difficult if not impossible to prove to start with, and then why would a big retailer assume that customers are trying to scam it all the time?
Im rather surprised at how many people have such low expectations of service from such a big retailer. Regardless of how much the product cost, if you buy something which is described as one thing and turns out to be another I think you have every right to ask them to remedy it, and Id be very surprised if anyone higher up the hierarchy than the person who dealt with it would condone it being dealt with as it was