My wife and I have been having problems with our baby registry at a certain national retail chain of baby related goods that will remain unnamed. If you’ve been reading this blog you know that I am currently a doctoral student in the arts, particularly theatre, but what I haven’t said before is that I have an undergraduate business degree. I worked for a number of years as a lead teller at another national bank before the questionable ethical behavior (at least at those lower levels) made me too uncomfortable to continue cashing in in the business world and I turned, instead, to art.
These unethical problems seem to plague businesses these days, especially with the economic problems facing our country currently, and it never ceases to amaze me the lengths that these businesses will go to in order to fleece money from customers. What I am going to warn you about today could very well happen with any baby registry (or, in fact, any business) and I suggest that you proceed with caution in the future. My wife and I will be avoiding registries in the future entirely.
The first problem: Problem number one occurred when my wife checked our baby registry online and noticed well over 30 items that had appeared on our registry (some very expensive) that we did not put on the registry. This despicable behavior could be written off as an honest mistake by an employee, but I had significant difficulty getting this fixed. Think about what happens, someone does something nice and buys something on your registry but when you go to return the product that you never put on the registry you are not given cash but instead a gift card for the value (perhaps) of the item. This means that the company continues to hold onto your friends money, earn interest on that money until you spend it, and you can only spend that money at that particular retailer. This is a shady business indeed.
What happened to us was that someone purchased one of these items that we didn’t place on our registry and didn’t give us a receipt. I was quick to call the company, and spent a great deal of time on the phone expressing my dissatisfaction at this crude money making scheme and was able to get cash back because I acted quickly. Don’t let this happen to you!
The second problem: If someone doesn’t give you a receipt (or gift receipt) and you need to return (or even exchange) the items, beware of the problem of lowered value. My wife and I were given too many newborn sized items (he really needs 0-3 months already) and we simply wanted to exchange these for the next size up. Well, they wouldn’t let us do that. Then, we asked for a gift card and they said that they really shouldn’t do that either. Eventually they agreed to but were only willing to give us $25.00 for our $60.00 of clothing. “No, thanks” we said. I asked them if this decision was worth losing our business and they didn’t know what to say (as we pushed our expensive stroller system a grandparent had bought for us at that store out of the building). Always get a receipt or try to exchange. The businesses, it seems, will simply try to steal money because you don’t know how much the item was purchased for so they’ll give you bottom dollar.
Since my wife and I live 1000 miles away from home our families are throwing a baby shower in December. They’ll all be asked not to purchase from this retailer. Also, we updated our registry at this business to express the problems we’ve had there and to ask family members (and others) not to buy items from this retailer for our son. Babies are big business. Keep as much of your (and everyone else’s) hard earned money as you can. One retailer lost two large families of buying power today because of $35.00. Are you listening big corporate retailers?