Serial Returner

An hour to close and a woman comes in with two HUGE bags of stuff to return. I was finishing an exchange for someone else so she dropped off the bags and said she'd be back later. Wait! Do you have a receipt? "They're in the bag," she said, as she continued out the door.

I thought it was strange, but I didn't recognize her at that point. The cashier did. It was the woman with mental issues.

When I finished with the exchange I opened the bags and was knocked over by the smell. What must her house smell like?! I breathed through my mouth as I picked through the contents: open merchandise, visibly used/very worn items with no packaging, expired items, merchandise with packaging more than a year old.........I took a look at the receipts. They were in an envelope........all 50 of them. Some of the receipts were from last year, the year before, all the way back to 2000. Some of the items expired as far back as 2002. (It IS 2006 now, right?)

Very few of the items were in sellable condition, while none were defective, so there was no legitimate reason for the return. There were 4 of the same half-empty item and everything was WAY past the return policy, if you could even find it on the receipts. Further, the last 1~2 years of receipts were exchanges or store credits because she had previously brought items back without a receipt.

I know in the past the then-store manager allowed all of her returns, but stuff that expired years ago?! Multiple packages of the same thing that are half-empty?! She couldn't argue that she didn't like the item, because she bought it on 4 separate occasions!

Complicating things is that about a week ago a man called and explained that he and his wife no longer had need of our products because of some lifestyle changes and asked if he could return certain items. I asked a few questions and said yes. If this is the same couple, then he left out some important parts of his story. "You told me yes on the phone!" isn't going to happen. This is ridiculous.

The written return policy is very rarely followed. Managers are supposed to use their judgment about what to return or not. How stupid is that? If I follow the written policy too closely then the customer gets upset and I get in trouble from the customer service department (and have to do the return anyway). If I deviate too far from the written policy the customer is happy but I get in trouble from the part of the office that processes the returns paperwork (and the store loses money). Before I went any further with this return, I wanted approval from someone higher up. Yes, that's right, pass the buck also means cover your ass.

The store manager is away again, so there's no one higher than me in the store. While the manager is still available for life-and-death, the-store-is-on-fire issues, for other things I go on up to the regional manager. I explained the whole thing to her and how long this customer has been doing this, that it's costing us a lot of money, etc. She agreed with my assessment that it's time for this to stop. She told me to give store credit on the things that were like new and could be resold, but on the expired, open, SMELLY stuff.....NO NO NO. Awesome! We so rarely completely agree!

By the time I went through the merchandise (and then disinfected my hands) and talked with the regional manager it was a half hour until close (when most of the other stores in the area close, too). Twenty 'til, quarter 'til, ten 'til, five 'til, CLOSED. Even though there were no other customers in the store, I waited five minutes to close the registers. I already had bad news that was going to upset the customer; I didn't want her to have any ammunition against me (like claiming that I closed early, which I never do).

We closed the registers, finished all the closing duties, and prepared to leave. The employees were waiting at the front while I checked the back and side doors; just as I got to the front she came up to the door. I told her we were closed and surprisingly she didn't argue and wasn't upset. She said she'd be back "tomorrow" to complete the returns.

Well, it's four days later and still no sign of her. The returned items are divided into two bags, returnable and not, and the "not" bag is double-bagged to keep the contamination from killing us all.