{"id":2233,"date":"2011-10-20T03:07:12","date_gmt":"2011-10-20T08:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=2233"},"modified":"2011-10-19T12:35:56","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T17:35:56","slug":"lowe-lowe-customer-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/10\/lowe-lowe-customer-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Lowe, Lowe Customer Service"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Tuesday, 18 October 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A few weeks ago, we paid a visit to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lowes.com\/\">Lowe&#8217;s<\/a> and spent just over a hundred bucks. I gave the cashier a $10 off coupon. Getting back in the car, however, I noticed I had a 10 <em>percent<\/em> off coupon which, in the case of our bill, would have meant a savings of just over a dollar. No big deal, I thought. Jennifer reminded me that we could use the 10% off coupon next time we went to Lowe&#8217;s.<\/p>\n<p>Today, I stopped at Lowe&#8217;s to buy some screws. I had the 10% off coupon in my wallet and I thought, hey, instead of using it to save maybe 10 cents on a few screws, I will ask them to apply the coupon to my bill from a few weeks ago, thereby getting store credit of a dollar, which I can then apply to the screws.<\/p>\n<p>So I walked up to the customer service counter. A young girl looked at the coupon, then told me that if I use the 10% off coupon, the $10 coupon would no longer apply. &#8220;I know,&#8221; I said, &#8220;but 10% off is, in this case, better than $10 off, so I&#8217;d rather use that one.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She began typing away at her computer. After a few moments, she looked up and told me it would be a couple minutes because she had to essentially refund everything on the list and then re-ring it. I chuckled at the crazy nature of this process &#8211; at Target, for example, the cashier would simply &#8216;zap&#8217; the coupon then &#8216;zap&#8217; the receipt and, <em>viola!<\/em>, the computer would state the refund amount and I&#8217;d be given store credit.<\/p>\n<p>After about two minutes, during which time she had to manually enter every item, she announced she had refunded me the total. I signed on some crappy screen. She then said she would now enter in all the items again, this time applying the better coupon.<\/p>\n<p>After another two minutes, she told me my new total. It was higher than my original total.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Um,&#8221; I said, &#8220;that&#8217;s not right. I should have gotten 10% off this time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You did,&#8221; she said, &#8220;but it looks like it&#8217;s not as good as $10.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; I said, speaking slowly for the typical American math student, &#8220;since I spent more than $100, then 10% is more than $10, so my savings should be higher.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She wasn&#8217;t sure what to say (math can be like that sometimes), so she called over her manager. He double-checked the sale and said that his employee was correct.He then noticed that the tax amount was higher. I was confused, so he explained that the taxes in Hennepin County (that&#8217;s where we were) are higher than in Ramsey County, which is where he believes West St. Paul (that&#8217;s where the original sale was located) is.<\/p>\n<p>I laughed, and told them I would not be paying the higher price &#8211; especially since I didn&#8217;t buy anything in Hennepin County and therefore should not be taxed for it. He said he didn&#8217;t know what to do, but since it was obvious I wasn&#8217;t about to sign for the sale &#8211; and he probably didn&#8217;t want me to just walk away with my $100+ refund &#8211; he typed in some magic manager code that allowed him to adjust the price to the original sale price. Why didn&#8217;t he give me the better price at that time? Good question. Lowe&#8217;s has a low price guarantee, but they evidently don&#8217;t stand by it.<\/p>\n<p>I then walked over to select the screws I needed. Lowe&#8217;s keeps their screws in little bags which I ABSOLUTELY HATE for two reasons:<\/p>\n<p>1. I can&#8217;t tell if the screws are the right size.<\/p>\n<p>No big problem here, I just poke the screws through the bags. On this occasion, I found the right size screws on the third try.<\/p>\n<p>2. That&#8217;s not how many screws I want to buy.<\/p>\n<p>I only needed four screws. There were ten in a bag. Those assholes.<\/p>\n<p>I went to the self-check out counter. It was acting funny, so an employee came over and said she would ring me up. She farted around with the self-check out computer for a few moments while she canceled my transaction, then tried ringing me up on her computer, only to announce that she couldn&#8217;t use my coupon because I had already used it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;No I didn&#8217;t,&#8221; I said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Did you just return something?&#8221; she asked.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; I clarified, &#8220;I tried using it to get a lower price, but your co-workers couldn&#8217;t figure out how to do that, so I ended up not using it.<\/p>\n<p>She then typed in a special code and gave me 10% off on the bag of screws.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, that&#8217;s my last time at Lowe&#8217;s. I heard on the radio yesterday that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.globalpost.com\/dispatch\/news\/regions\/americas\/united-states\/111017\/lowes-closing-stores-cutting-jobs-home-improvement\">they are closing several of their stores<\/a> in the near future. Now I know why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tuesday, 18 October 2011 A few weeks ago, we paid a visit to Lowe&#8217;s and spent just over a hundred bucks. I gave the cashier a $10 off coupon. Getting back in the car, however, I noticed I had a 10 percent off coupon which, in the case of our bill, would have meant a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2233"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2236,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2233\/revisions\/2236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}