Difficulties with Dealing with Large Corporation Chain Stores

Why do big corporations spend millions of dollars on advertisements, sales, promotions, etc...to help get customers frequent their stores when in turn when you shop at these stores it is a horrible experience. My father in law just had a terrible experience with a store that shall remain nameless. He purchased a couple of high priced items weeks ago for another family member. He waited and waited and just when he was running out of time before he needed to give these items as gifts, the store contacted him and told him that the items were out of stock and won't be restocked for quite some time. WHAT? Just like that. It took them three weeks to a month to figure out that they were out of these particular items? Doesn't make sense to me at all. Of course when the customer service representative called, they couldn't be nastier. They couldn't care less that now my father in law was in a bad situation and it was all their fault. They did not offer any solutions or replacement items. What kind of business would do that? I do wonder if the head honchos up in cooperate know that their customer service people down in the stores are acting this way.

I can recall many times that I have gone shopping in big named chain stores with my two year old son looking for help. No one would help us. Especially if you go to a home improvement store. You can forget about getting any type of help. It is almost like the salespeople see you coming and they run the other way. When you finally do track someone down who you think might be able to help, they act like you are bothering them. Almost like you are keeping them from their lunch break. I have actually had one tell me he was on his way to his dinner break and couldn't help me but would find someone who could. Nope. No one showed up to help me and I ended up standing there like an idiot. It is so frustrating. I do not like shopping in those big stores.

Whenever my husband needs to go to one of these stores, I make him go by himself. I like to shop in smaller stores where there are two or three sales people that actually want to help you. Don't the salespeople from the big stores work on commission? My own experience with a furniture store turned out to be a nightmare too. I once ordered a mattress and a bed for my son. We were planning on transitioning him from a crib to a big boy bed. We went to a couple of stores until we found the one we liked. I hate to use these words but the salesman was a complete idiot. We must have been there for almost an hour trying to complete the order. This I will give you the name of. It was the furniture store Levitz. What a catastrophe. He had to call the manager over and she was so nasty. She wasn't nasty to us by any means, she was actually nasty to the salesman. This was not a good impression for the store. It turned out that the salesman quoted us all the wrong prices and had to redo all the paperwork. By then the price jumped up almost $400 and I had lost my patience. I told him to rip up the order and we walked out. My husband couldn't believe I did that. He said he never saw me turn away from buying something before. I had just had it. Oh and I forgot to mention, that store is now out of business.

We ended up buying the bed at a different furniture store. We had a much better buying experience but still had problems once we received the order. They never ordered the mattress for the bed. We paid for it but it was on backorder and they never told us. It turned out we had actually bought the floor model mattress. I didn't want that. I wasn't going to let my son sleep on a mattress that hundreds of people have already sat on, gross. So that was a new fight with customer service. Back and forth we went until they finally realized they were at fault and ended up giving us a mattress at a better quality for the same price. The only problem now is that the mattress is too thick and that made the new bed too high for my two year old to sleep in. So now he is still in the crib and we have this ridiculously huge bed and mattress as decoration taking up space in his room. We didn't even want to return everything because that would have opened up a while new can of worms.

I just hope one day the big guys up in corporate come out of their offices and get a reality check on what is really happening in their stores and see how customers are rally being treated. I have a feeling that they wouldn't even want to be a customer in their own store.