Mother's Day

WHAT a mother's day.

Yesterday felt extremely long. Actually, before yesterday felt extremely long. My mother has been going on and on about how she wants to start collecting Friends on DVD. So, being the extremely thoughtful daughter that I am (and because KMart was having an incredible sale - $29.99 per season) I thought that I'd get it for her for Mother's Day.

Anyway, on Thursday I trek down to Kmart and buy Season 1. Saturday rocks round and I am in a meeting for most of the afternoon. While there through I get a text from Isaac (who is out shopping for a present for his mother) saying that he's run into my parents out shopping and my mother has bought Seasons 1 -4 of Friends.

WHO DOES THAT????

WHY would she do that the day before Mother's Day????

So, when I finally get home at 4pm I ring Kmart and the phone rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings and rings...

Meanwhile...I am thinking of how we ring retail stores at work and how we are only allowed to let it ring four times...

...and rings and rings and rings.

Finally, someone picks up. I ask if they have any of Season 5 in store. There's a whole lot of noise and the girl tells me that she'll go check. Turns out they don't. They do have Season 7 though. So, I ask her if they can hold one of those for me until I can come in at about 5. She tells me they don't do holds for sale items.

WHAT?

How stupid and crap is that??? I realise that the whole point of a sale is to move stock. But I've already told her that I want it for mother's day and I'll be in later that day. What kind of STUPID, unhelpful policy is that????

Worse still she tells me they don't do swaps on DVDs. Regardless of the fact that I haven't touched the packaging. If it doesn't have a security seal on it - the security seal that the incompetent in store neglected to put on the DVD when I purchased it on Thursday - they won't take it back.

By this point I'm pretty highly pissed off. Kmart's customer service is CRAP at the best of times. It's impossible to find anything in store. And when I was there on thursday, instead of giving me proper directions to where I could find the damn dvds the man chose to just tell me that they were in the middle aisle of the store (which they weren't) and answer the phone in a manner that suggested that I was seriously inconveniencing him by asking such an obviously stupid question.

Isaac gets home around now and is pretty concerned when he sees exactly how pissed off I am. To cut a long story short he makes me go into the store and take the DVD to the counter. The guy on the counter makes two long phone calls and then finally tells us that yes we can return it. I'm not feeling particularly charitable towards Kmart anyway and had he said that we couldn't return it I would have shouted.

To me, something like that screams of bad customer service. I work in customer service. The girl who I originally spoke to on the phone should have at least tried to solve the problem or to offer some sort of alternative. The guy who originally served me on Thursday shouldn't have been so damned rude and actually helped me.

It pisses me off because I wouldn't treat anyone who rung into work this way and I don't really expect to be treated that way when I'm out shopping.

It'll be a long time before I set foot into Kmart again.