Target-ed.

A lot has been written recently over the “Merry Christmas” thing…how a number of large companies decided to go “PC” and erase any reference to “Christmas” from their advertising and interaction with customers. Target is one of those companies that opted for “Happy Holidays.”

This post is NOT about that issue.

I bring this up, simply to put Target into perspective – it’s a very large company that has, in certain quarters, some PR problems as of late. Great ads – boneheaded PR.

About four months ago, I bought a lamp from Target. It was a nice lamp. A floor lamp, in a kind of faux Mission style. Fake mica lampshade. Fake antique finish. The kind where when you touch the metal part of the lamp, it switches from “off” to “dim” to “medium” to “bright” and back to “off.” Nice.

It broke last week. The touch switch suddenly stopped working. No way to turn it on/off other than at the plug. Bummer.

I tried to take it back to Target, and get them to exchange it. It is there that this story begins it’s decent into pathos.

Here’s the deal. I’m not an unreasonable person. All I expected them to do was to swap the bloody thing for one that worked. That’s it. Dream on.

I began my quest at customer service. They sent me over to look at the lamp section, to find the part number of the old lamp. First bad sign: they had no lamps like mine in stock. Turned out they’d discontinued that model. (I think I know why.)

I spoke to the “customer service” representative at the counter. She said, she needed the original box or the receipt, to track the stock number.

Pause with me for a nanosecond.

Who among you keeps boxes? I don’t mean boxes for expensive computer equipment. I mean a box for some consumer product that you have to destroy in order to open. Not me.

After pleading my case to a distant and not-particularly-helpful department manager, I retreated back to my home to look for said receipt. Through a process somewhat akin to a miracle, my erstwhile wife was able to pull that particular rabbit out of that particular hat. Thus armed, I retuned the next day to Target.

For some reason, there’s always a line at “customer support” (I now know why.) After an agonizing wait, it was my turn. I triumphantly thrust the receipt toward the bored and unhelpful wait staff. She promptly put out a pager call to the floor personnel in the Lamps department. Evidently, she wanted proof that the item on the receipt was, in fact, the item she saw before her. By some miracle, this was (finally) established. She then went to her trusty barcode scanner to see about a refund or exchange. But no, she informed me that “my receipt had expired.”

Pause with me again, as we ponder the mysteries of how a receipt can expire. (Allas poor receipt…I knew him well. A paper of infinite jest…) I was informed that Target’s evidently iron-clad policy was that they offered a 90-day warranty on their merchandise. No more. No less. On the ninety-first day, bucko, you are S.O.L.

We were not amused.

I figured I had nothing to lose, so I asked to escalate the problem to the next ring of Hell…er, um, to the supervisor. I was then introduced to Tarah, the “L.O.D.,” whatever that is. Now Tarah would have not been out of place in Stepford. She was unfailingly polite, and just as unfailingly dedicated to parroting the company line. I tried every way I could think of to penetrate her defenses, but to no avail. I was then introduced to what I can only refer to as Target’s “circular logic.”

I was informed that they could not take it back becasue of “company policy.”

I replied, “So what you’re saying is Target would rather adhere to company policy and lose a customer, than stand behind their merchandise.”

“No sir, that’s not what I’m saying. We just have a 90-day warranty policy.”

“So, then you’re saying I would have been better off buying the lamp somewhere else – some place that values their customers over an arbitrary and caprecious policy designed to limit your losses with reckless disregard for your customers.”

No sir, it’s just that after the 90 days, we require the manufacturers to warranty their items.

Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. “So who was the manufacturer, pray tell?”

Well, we don’t know, since the item has been discontinued. If you have the box, we can get the name from that.”

Again with the box thing. “I don’t HAVE the box. Can’t you look it up?”

“No sir, the item is no longer in the computer.”

After another 15 minutes or so of this round-robin, she finally offered to “go back and look at some old Target ads and see if the lamp was ever in one…which might – might – tell her the manufacturer.” She then offered to give me a small discount on a new lamp. Of course, 90 days after I would get that one home, I would begin wondering if THIS was the day the lamp would malfunction. No thanks.

So I left. Unhappy. Resentful. Aggravated. And I went just a bit down the road to The Home Depot. They had a lamp there that was almost identical to the Target lamp. Oh, except that it was a name brand, was infinitely better made, and on sale for half the price of what I paid for the original lamp at Target. I purchased it without missing a beat.

The moral to the story? I’m really not jazzed about companies that kow-tow down to a tiny but vocal minority of humanists, atheists, and rabble-rousers who want to suck the joy out of Christmas for the rest of us, especially when said company evidently cares more for them than they do a loyal customer who just wanted some defective merchandise replaced.

Oh, yeah. And despite their great ads, I won’t be shopping there any more. Marketing is great. Good customer service is greater.