Edit 3/30/04: Warning. Below is a tantrum. It is not written in my normal calm, articulate demeanor. It is shrill. It is petty. But it accurately reflects my level of pique wrought by the whole mess. I really did not have the spare time required to wade through this morass. I only wanted a pair of jeans, after all. I didn't expect it to be this hard...
It all started with my Presidents' Day Weekend getaway, the one where I drove 7 hours before remembering to pack my suitcase in the car. This gaffe required that I make a quick shopping trip to reconstitute my wardrobe, since I was going to be seen in public and didn't think it polite to wear the same clothes for the next three days running.
I ended up at a local mall where there was a Gap. I like Gap jeans because with their petite ("ankle") sizing their pants actually end where my feet begin, a rare feat apparently since most other pants I've tried on don't. I figured I could always use a new pair so I stopped in, where I discovered that they were running a promotion that if I bought a certain value's worth of clothing I would get a $15 dollar on the spot discount.
Here's where the trouble began. I tried on a pair of jeans and liked how they fit, but not the darker color. So I asked if they had my size in a lighter color. They said they didn't have them in stock, but if I paid for them now, they'd have Headquarters send out the right size. This meant that with the other pair of pants I wanted to buy I would be able to lock in the discount. It was very nice of them to go out of their way to make sure I could take advantage of the promotion, and also very smart. They didn't know quite how desperate I was for clothing at that particular moment. For all they knew I could have left the store making no purchases at all if I weren't able to get the benefit of the promotion simply because they didn't happen to have garment I wanted in the correct size.
But they are still entitled to some criticism. Apparently the pants in the lighter color are not the same. They are a different material and cut differently, cost more, and ultimately are not suited for my needs. But because they didn't have my size in stock to try on, and because they also never mentioned the difference, I didn't find this out until the pair was mailed to me. When I finally tried them on I discovered that I didn't get what I had asked for, apparently because what I had asked for didn't actually exist. OK, this was annoying but not unforgivable in itself. The clerks should have told me, but the mistake was probably innocent.
What is unacceptable is the ordeal I had to go through to get the situation fixed. I decided that I'd settle for the darker color, which had a better fit. It turns out that these jeans are $10 cheaper. So I went to a Gap in Cambridge last week to swap the bad jeans for the right jeans and get back the $10 difference. Sounds simple, right? I thought so, but apparently the Gap didn't concur.
No, regardless of the fact that I had to make this extra errand to because of their bad advice, the Cambridge Gap would not fix the situation without making me give up a portion of the $15 discount from the in-store instant rebate. How much of the discount was unclear, as the operators at the poorly-named "customer service" hotline could not explain by any reasonable rationale how much discount was apparently attached to the jeans that I had originally purchased. Was the $15 to be pro-rated over the two pairs of pants? Was it to be allocated based on the relative cost of each item? The receipt didn't indicate any discount had been particularly applied to the jeans, and, furthermore, the original Gap representatives had assured me, in response to my meticulous questions (including, "Is there any way that I might regret making this transaction in this way?"), that I would have no problem making any necessary returns or exchanges if the pants that arrived were unacceptable for any reason.
Already stunned that what should have been so simple - a return with a straightforward price-adjustment - had reached such Byzantine proportions because the clerks couldn't figure out how to press the right buttons on the cash register to make this happen, I was even more infuriated by the conversation I had with the so-called "customer service" agents who refused to instruct the clerks how to do it. According to them I was bound to the terms of an unarticulated "policy", whereas they could refuse to be bound by their explicitly-made agreements. After wasting a fruitless hour of my life, I left, unsatisfied and angry and ready to never set foot in another Gap ever again, nice fitting jeans be damned.
The next day I had a long conversation with my extremely wonderful contracts professor about the legalities of the situation. It was quite educational and a good review of the course. It was also a textbook lesson about the importance of reading numbers. She looked at my receipt, the one that wasn't quite clear about how the $15 had been applied. The Gap customer alienation agents had insisted that some of the $15 had been applied to the jeans. But the receipt said no such thing outright, and only had this weird line saying that $15 was 38% off. Off of what? None of the Gap clerks knew, but my professor looked at the relative prices of the jeans and the other pants I was not returning and realized that the $15 was 38% of that other pair. Therefore NO DISCOUNT, in fact, had been applied to the jeans. The Gap would therefore not have been entitled to make me forfeit any of the $15 to exchange the jeans under any circumstances, even if I hadn't had to make the exchange in order to clean up the mess THEY HAD MADE.
The Gap's refusal to make things right also made no sense at all by any measure. All I wanted was a pair of jeans and $10 that I had a reasonable – if not also absolutely correct – claim to. What sense did it make to nickel and dime me into the frustrated resolve to boycott them forever? Hoping that perhaps somewhere in the Universe there was a Gap representative with more sense than the idiots on the phone, today I went to a different Gap to try again. This time I asked to speak directly with a manager and was armed with the information about how the discount was applied. The manager was initially reluctant to do what I asked, but I think she didn't understand what I was asking for. "You can only have the jeans and the $10," she admonished me. Um, great, that's all I want. So the transaction was processed, very simply it turned out by one of the regular clerks with no omnipotent manager intervention required, and I was on my way with the $10 and the right jeans.
I'm not sure where that leaves me though. I'm so disgusted by the way I was treated in the previous attempt to rectify the situation. It was a situation brought about initially by very good customer service that unfortunately subsequently wrought some appallingly bad – if not downright dishonest – customer service. When you deal with a merchant the resulting transaction is its own contract, governed by the same rules of performance and breach that any other more formal contract would have. The Gap was essentially refusing to honor the bargain it had struck with me that original day in order to induce me to buy anything at the store. Consequently I'm not sure if the company can be trusted to honor any future agreements, at least not without me potentially needing going through a tremendous effort to hold them to their word. I'm therefore inclined to steer clear of them both on principle and lest I be vulnerable to their future arbitrary whims. It's not about the $10, especially since I ultimately got it back. It's about refusing to reward powerful parties who somehow feel immune to honor their legal obligations to the less powerful.
If only I were taller this would be much less of a sacrifice.
And I still hate shopping.
Edit 3/28/03: Date fixed to reflect when this should have been posted.