Friday, October 7, 2011

An Open Letter to Payless (Shoe Source!)

Dear Payless,

I appreciate that you offer low-cost shoe options for those of us who enjoy shoe quantity over quality.  I also appreciate that you offer site-to-store shipping for those of us who are too cheap to pay shipping costs.  These services led me to believe that you understand your target customer demographic.  However, over the course of my last 2 orders I have come to realize that you must not fully understand your customers, because we differ a bit in the ways we define certain business practices.

-When my order arrives and some of the shoes are missing, as with the first order I placed a year ago, I call that sloppy.

-When my order confirmation email this time around says "Shipping Method: Ship To Local Payless Store (14-17 days)" and then it turns out those 14-17 days are from the time my order leaves the warehouse, not from the time my order is placed, I call that annoying, but understandable.  I'll take the blame for that one for not reading the fine print hidden on your website.

-When YOUR associate calls ME to say my order is in, and then it turns out my order is not, in fact, anywhere to be found in the store, I call that careless.

-When I call 18 days after my shoes have left your warehouse to try to find out where they are and you tell me that those 14-17 days are actually business days, even though I cannot find anywhere on your website that actually SAYS you mean business days, I call that just plain lying to get me off your back.  And I call THAT insulting, not to mention terrible customer service.

-When you cannot get a pair of shoes from your warehouse to one of your stores within a MONTH of the time they are ordered, I call that pathetic.  With a supply chain like that, how did you ever expand to almost 4,500 stores worldwide?


So now that we're on the same page, I would like my shoes.  The shoes I ordered and paid for OVER A MONTH AGO.  The shoes I ordered because I wanted to, you know, own them and wear them, preferably before the end of the season.  Or if they are, as I suspect, lost somewhere (which we won't know until the absolute longest amount of time you can stretch "14-17 days" to has passed and you decide to actually help me locate my order) I'll take a refund.  There are plenty of other cute and painful shoes in the sea.

Sincerely,

An extremely irritated customer


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