What Happened to Customer Service?

Here is my little bah humbug mini-rant for this Christmas season. I want to share this because I know that many, many people shop at this store both in person and online and I want anyone who might read this to be aware of the complete and utter lack care for their customers.  Let me preface this by saying that I have worked in retail and other venues in the past that make me very familiar with how customer service SHOULD work.  Here's a hint:  not like this. 

I ordered two items from Target.com on Black Friday for Sweetpea and Sugar Plum. I got the email confirmation giving me a estimated delivery date of 12/5-12/7. December 7th came and it was getting late in the day and still no package AND I hadn't received an email stating the items had been shipped like I did with some Target purchases I had made a few days before. So I called them. Got someone with an accent so thick, I could barely understand them and they couldn't even pronounce the names of the products that I ordered. I won't go into my views on outsourcing in this post, but regardless, I do believe that if someone is going to be employed with an American company, they should be able to speak and understand English fairly well.  It just makes it easier when someone needs to call in.  After struggling to describe the problem and get a response that acknowledged understanding of it, I received a lot of runaround and I was told that the package should arrive the next day. They gave me the UPS tracking number.

The next morning, I went to the UPS website, typed in the tracking number and got this message about how the shipping label had been printed and the system would be updated when the package was in transit. I called Target back only to be told that I should expect the package at any moment on my doorstep. At 6PM I called UPS and they told me that while they had record of the shipping label being printed, they had no record of ever even RECEIVING a package from the target distribution center!

I called target back, mildly, okay VERY irritated, only to be hung up on TWICE. Then I finally got some lady who was very rude to me about how the delivery date stated in the email was an "estimate." I said, "Yes, that would be fine if anyone could even LOCATE the package to even find out what was causing the delay." She asked me to wait 24 more hours. I did. No package, still no update with the tracking number, so I called and asked for either a refund OR for them to send me new merchandise since no one could seem to find the other merchandise. I was told they couldn't refund me because I paid with paypal, but they could give me a gift card. They wouldn't reorder the merchandise because they had to wait SEVEN days for an investigation with UPS to ensure that I hadn't received the package. I told them that was ridiculous since it took me less than 5 minutes to call UPS and speak to them about it. If I can do it, you can to.

I told them to just give me the gift card so I could reorder the products and move on with my life. We don't play up Christmas from the commercial side that much in our home, and this was causing me unnecessary stress.  They were supposed to send it to me in my email, because Christmas is upon us and I didn't want to risk waiting for a physical gift card in the mail and not have it arrive in time. We don't have an endless budget for Christmas, and this money, while it may not seem like a lot to corporate bigwigs, was certainly a substantial amount to us.  My husband works hard for this money and we just need it or its equivalent back so that we can finish up our Christmas shopping for our children. 

They said it would take up to 24 hours for it to be in my inbox. 24 hours later...nada. I call, they "reprocess it." I wait. 24 hours later....still nothing. I call, they do some supposed "rush" on it and tell me I should have it in a few hours. 7 hours later...still absolutely nothing.  I call and they actually tell me that they are only going to refund PART of what I paid.

I have to admit that I quite nearly flipped out at this point and so I handed the phone to Hubs to handle before I acted unseemly.  He used the big man stern voice that says I. Mean. Business. They fixed the amount. Then they tell HIM that the gift card is marked as delivered and even though I am staring at my email screen while I'm on the phone, telling them it isn't there, they are arguing with him telling him that we must not see it.  *sigh* Then they tell us about there being some sort of technical issue that is holding up the e-gift card, so they are going to cancel that order and just mail us one...which takes at least 5-7 business days and it is only slightly more than that many days until Christmas.

The story goes ON AND ON AND ON. Needless to say it has been WELL over a week, I still don't have my merchandise, a refund, OR a gift card. I even called the corporate office, which did nothing to help the situation. I will NOT be shopping with Target again online or otherwise.



It is such a sad thing that big corporate companies just simply do not care about whether or not their customers are happy.  Greed has taken over to such an extent and given them so much power that they shrug their shoulders at the prospect of losing a customer.  It's sad.  Very sad.  What happened to the days when business owners not only cared, but went the extra mile to provide good service so they could draw in repeat business and have news of their company spread through good old fashioned word of mouth praise?  It would appear that expecting that sort of thing is only for the days of yore.  *sigh* I sincerely hope that none of my readers have had to experience this type of aggravation this Christmas season and if you have, here's a big ((hug)) for you. :)