At the risk of making this blog sound like the official house organ of the Costco Fan Club, I have to say that the joint certainly came through today. I could not believe it! They took back almost $200 worth of junk, some of it stuff I would normally not dare to ask a retailer to accept.
Okay, it wasn’t surprising that they refunded all my money for the Flip video camera that didn’t work. Their return policy on electronics has always been pretty amazing. Even though they shortened the period in which they would accept returns on such gadgetry, they still will take back just about anything. So, voilà, $130 back on the card.
Now, here’s where it gets amazing…
After the CSR kindly returned my money for the camera, I presented a bag full of raw, sliced-up leg of lamb.
Yes.
My excuse: after I cut it up and put the stuff I intended to eat later in the freezer, I fried one piece of it and realized it had turned. (Rancid is the word we’re groping for.) Yea, verily, you could smell the off odor even though the stuff was frozen solid.
More money back on the card. That was only slightly surprising.
It gets better…
Then I trotted out the RoC facial blowtorch and explained what had happened when I applied it, following the instructions.
She said, “Oh, yeah…I can see that redness on your face.”
“It’s better today than it was yesterday,” I remarked.
Incredibly, she returned my money in full even though I presented her with three unwrapped tubes of face cream, two of which had been opened and partly used!
I couldn’t believe it. Really, I thought they might refund my money for the rotten lamb, but I expected to be told to take a flying f*** at the moon when I asked for money back for the used cosmetics.
Is that or is that not astonishing?
A$k and ye shall re¢eive!
Costco is pretty amazing with their return policy but what I’ve heard a couple times (though still unconfirmed) is that they have an agreement with the vendors that they get the products from to get the money back, so it doesn’t come out of Costco’s bottom line. If the vendors end up getting screwed, they’ll eventually stop offering their products through Costco.
@ Money Beagle: Well, the vendor should have to eat the cost of peddling an unsatisfactory product. The camera was defective. The lamb smelled funny when I opened the package and continued downhill even after it was frozen. And that RoC stuff probably ought not to be sold at all, whether through Costco or any other outlet.
The CSR urged me to put a descrlption of what happened with the ROC in the customer comment box. She said management needed to know about it. I didn’t bother, because I had enough to do that day. But if the pain and swelling don’t clear up in another day or so, I’ll probably print out that post and drop it off at Costco. Either that or, if a doctor says the damage is permanent, deliver it to a lawyer.
I know most Costcos are amazing this way. My Costco (in Yonkers, NY), however, is consistently really nasty and challenging about all returns. The “satisfaction guaranteed” policy isn’t really so, if you research it. There is a clause about returns being subject to individual store managers’ decisions. It’s so bad that I e-mailed costco.com, and was told that the e-mail was being forwarded to the local manager. Well, at least it was a non-canned response. But, duh, the local manager apparently IS the problem.