Target Tirade by Debbie Mascot
Draft of letter to two Target stores and the headquarters...
To Whom It May Concern:
On the evening of Friday, April 26, my husband and I made our weekly Target run to check if a desk I want for the baby's room is on sale. Since the baby isn't due until October, buying the desk now isn't urgent. We had decided to wait to see if it went on sale. When we got to our local Target, we were aghast to find no desk! We found all the furniture was new and so 'ours' must have been discontinued. We realize now that we shouldn't have waited; however, if there were still any in stock, we wanted it!
We went to the front of the store and found an associate at the checkout counter. I explained the situation and asked if they could check the stockroom to see if there were any floating around somewhere. She said, and I quote, "No. We don't have any more, but you can check at Customer Service. Maybe you should start shopping at Walmart because they have a layaway plan and you could use that instead of looking for sales." Seriously.
We then went to the main customer service and they paged someone to the furniture area so that we could explain the situation (again). The girl who met us there was extremely nice and helpful and, although she didn't find us a desk in that store, after 36 minutes on the phone first with the Dublin store and then the San Ramon Greatland store, she found 3 in stock.
We raced the 16 miles, one way, to San Ramon and went to the desk area. Only the floor model was there. We had someone paged to help us and he came and told us that he couldn't help us. So we asked for the manager, Christian, and he came over and looked around. He didn't find the desk, told us that Target doesn't sell the floor models, and said there were no more in stock. We responded that someone on the phone told us that there were three, but he said since we didn't have the code for the inventory, they couldn't pull it up on the computer. After hemming and hawing for quite awhile, he then said that he would go to the front and look through the code book for us and see what he could do. He told us this would take quite awhile so we should shop for 15 minutes and then call from a red phone and he'd come over and meet us. We walked to the books section and he passed us on the way to the back, helping another customer. A mere 2 minutes had passed.
We waited the allotted 15 minutes and called and were told by the operator that they had no desks. He didn't come meet us to explain and he didn't deliver the news himself. The operator simply told us that we wouldn't be helped.
I am disturbed by the level of customer service by these two of your stores on so many levels that it's embarrassing. I am a customer service representative myself and I know that sometimes there just isn't anything we can do to give the client what they want. However, the manner in which this is communicated to the client is the important part and the part that is dearly lacking in the two stores that I visited last Friday evening.
While waiting for the one actual good employee while she was holding on the phone for the other store, we watched three of her coworkers make derogatory comments about their jobs, about the pay, the boss, the hours, and the customers. We heard one employee tell her coworkers that she was giving her notice the next day. We weren't hidden; we were right there in front of the counter and clearly we were customers.
The extreme lack of customer service in both stores was nearly enough to make me want to take the advice of the first associate we encountered Friday evening: begin shopping at Walmart.
Sincerely,
Deborah E. Mascot