We’ve all had the experience of coming up with a snappy one-liner just a bit later than when we needed it. Often, it comes ten minutes later, sometime the next day. I had one of those moments this morning.

Mrs. VandS and I went to Bed Bath and Beyond yesterday. It’s a wonderful store, where everything is always 20% off. They don’t come right out and tell you that, but it’s true. Once you’re on their mailing list, they’ll send you a coupon good for 20% off any single item. And they’ll send you another two days later. And another, etc. etc. You can collect them like Pokemon.

Here’s the trick: While they have expiration dates, the cashiers never look at them. I’ve had store managers swipe one through without looking. We used two over the weekend that had expired last August.

The problem was, we had to return a couple of things. We used a gift card to buy them. We envisioned one of two possibilities coming from this:

(A) They’d refund us cash.

(B) They’d give us a new gift card for the refunded amount.

Since the refund amounted to $32 and change, I wasn’t expecting cash. But — and here’s the catch — they could only give us “store credit” and not a new gift card. So instead of a nice, easy to hold gift card to slide into the wallet, we received a register receipt with a bar code on it that says we have $32 in store credit. That’s the kind of thing that’s easily lost, ripped up, or faded with old age. Why not just give us a new gift card? They already have our money. It doesn’t matter which form it’s in. But the receipt is dangerous. That’s likely why they do it — they know that it’s less likely we’ll ever spend that money this way. Or perhaps they’re trying to save the nickel on the piece of plastic used to create the gift card.

So we took the receipt and walked away.

Why oh why didn’t I think of asking them this: “Thanks for the receipt for $32.43. I’d like to buy a gift card with my store credit now for $32.43.”

WHY DIDN’T I THROW IT BACK AT THEM?

I’m half tempted to drive over there to try that now.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 9:26 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.