The Spring shoes store case

Spring is a shoes store belonging to the ALDO groupe. The incident happened at a store located in the McGill shopping center in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Incident:

A pair of winter shoes were bought from this store and the sole cracked after only 5 weeks. The shoes become useless for the Canadian winter, water was getting inside.

Actions:

We returned the shoes to the store and asked for a refund. We were told by the clerk that we will only get a credit for the full amount. We told the clerk that our confidence in the store was very low after experiencing first hand their products, and insisted on a refund. The clerk refused and we asked to speak to the store manager. The store manager refused to give us a refund and showed us the policy of the store. It was written that the store only provides a refund within 30 days after the purchase IF THE CUSTOMER IS NOT SATISFIED WITH THE PRODUCT. We told the store manager that in this case it is not a matter of satisfaction, the shoes were of very poor quality and they become useless after only 4 weeks of use.

The store manager refused and we told her that we were going to publicize this incident on the Internet and file a complaint to the "Bureau de Protection aux Consommateurs". The store manager did not react to this threat.

We then asked to speak to a higher person. At first the store manager accepted very easily and handed us a business card with a phone number to call. We called the number immediately and got stack waiting on an automated system. After 10 minutes of persistence we got back into the store and told the store manager that it seemed impossible to reach someone at the phone number she gave us. We realized that the business card she handed us was only a tactic to get us out of the store rapidly, hoping to get tired calling the number and abandoning our attempt. She told us that she was going to call that higher person, but that we had to wait.

The waiting game began. The store manager was coming to us every 5-10 minutes telling us that the person was busy and hard to get, and that we should wait a little more. At first we told the store manager that we had a lot of time on our hands and that we could wait , the message being that we can patiently play the waiting game. After a while we decided to turn the time we were waiting in their store to our advantage.

We started to speak lowed and to show our dissatisfaction about their products. We also took pictures of the broken shoes in front of the logo of the store. The commotion we were making attracted the attention of other shoppers, who were looking at us and listening to our comments. We were also speaking loud about our plans to publish the pictures and the story on the Internet, and to make a complaint to the "Bureau de Protection aux Consommateurs".

Result:

In a very short time after we started the commotion the store manager came to announce that we were granted full refund for the shoes.

Some analysis

It seams that is this particular case the decisive action was the commotion we made in the store. We were dealing with an inexperienced store manager, a girl in her mid-twenties. She didn't respond to our threat of publicizing the story, but she was very sensitive to the disorder we were creating in the store and to the fact that customers present there ware getting a bad opinion. This fact should not be neglected: there are many people out there that still don't understand the potential of the new technology. Telling someone that the story will be published on the Internet doesn't always produce the desired effect. It depends on how educated the person is in these matters. DELL Computer appears to be very sensitive to this sort of actions as one can see from the The Dell Computer case. It is not surprising since all their business goes through the Internet. Being an actor in the Spring shoe store event I can say that taking pictures of the broken shoes with our cell phone camera in front of the store, and with the logo of the company, had some effect on the young store manager. Our gestures were a little exaggerated and we also attracted attention during this scene. But there is no doubt that technology helped a little in this case. We could also call the phone number on the business card right on the spot, and come right back to the store manager once we realized we will have no chance to speak with a human being by this mean.

One thing is certain, they can afford to loose a few customers, but they cannot afford to produce one single mad customer!