Worst thing returned at your store?

[sprocket79]

The worst thing I ever had to process a return on was this gross pair of sandals. This woman came in with a pair of 7 year old sandals that were all worn and DISGUSTING. Not only grossness on the bottom of the sandals, but on top. It was obvious she had a foot fungus problem. It was so disgusting that I have to wonder why she even tortures humanity by wearing sandals.

I believe she wanted to return them because a strap broke. Hello! 7 years of wear and tear will do that! I refused to return and she made me call a manager. The manager comes over and I tell him the story. He looks at the sandals and actually recognizes the style from 7 years ago!!! So, he made me return them for $3. The sandals were originally $30.

They were so disgusting. I refused to touch them. I would only handle them while wearing our plastic bags around my hands as gloves. That was the day I stopped caring about my job.

Oddly enough the best return I ever had involved pants that were even older. They were 21 years old (older than I was at the time). This woman had bought Dockers for her husband in 1977 and he had never worn them. So they stayed in the original bag with the receipt in them at the bottom of the closet for 21 years. She cleaned out the closet and found them and decided to see if she could try to return them. Amazingly, Dockers have not changed much in 21 years. They were exactly the same as the ones on the shelf, except they had a different tag style. I had to call a manager to see if I could return them and to get help to process the return since receipts have changed since 1977. The whole time the woman was great! She thought it was hysterically funny that we were actually going to do the return for her. In the end she got exactly what she paid for the pants. We made a new tag for the pants and put them back out of the floor since they were perfectly good. Best return ever.

[Hyndis]

I am actually guilty of this, but for a good reason. I had gotten one of those motorized automatic scooper boxes... and the motor kept going out or going crazy. I made sure to clean the box the best I could and double bagged it in outside grade trashbags. The person who did the return did thank me for that.

Have you found one of those that actually works?

I've tried two such machines, seeing as I have three indoors cats. I felt bad about returning them, so I didn't, but neither of them work properly.

They're just average house cats. They're not elephants. Yet it seems that the machine jams every time they use the litter box.


For kittehs! http://s212.photobucket.com/albums/cc254/hyndis/pics/

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Note to self: Do not show mom Saydrah's thread, as she has 3 guinea pigs as pets and had 8 at one time.

-Dead plants (IMO plants should always be final sale)

QFT. Plants sometimes die. Deal with it. But my store will never declare plants to be all sales final because the "guarantee" them. If they die, the customer just has to dig them up and bring them back with the receipt.

Result: carts of dead plants lined up in front of the service desk dripping dirt all over the floor, and the backroom stinking to high heaven from all the rotting plants in the trash.

And then you find out half of the returned plants were "good" plants marked down from retail because they were starting to die or look crappy. Hello, what were you expecting? They were marked down for a reason!

Knowing how our lawn and garden people generally don't take care of plants (not pruning, deadheading, or even watering them decent), I question why people buy them from us. A full-service garden center probably has better plants that are actually taken care of, and people who actually know stuff about plants, but you pay extra for those things.

[Nakajo]

I believe it is Nakajo's turn here. You know how I work for the store that will take ANYTHING back, and most here I've mentioned in prior posts....

Ahem...

-A 5 year old hot tub (just yesterday, sigh)
-a 1 1/2 year old open bottle of olive oil with half of it used
-8 month old salmon
-2 year old baby toys still covered in food and baby tooth marks all over it
-3 to 5 year old used rusty grills (this is a regular occurrence)
-a jug of milk... with the milk taken out and replaced with water

Those were the ones we accepted. Here are some that we said NO WAY to...

-GBA video games that were at least 5-7 years old
-a year old piano worth $11,000
-a singular king crab leg, which the person wanted the full weighed price (around $120) for all of the ones that they bought (and ate, I'm sure)
-cut flowers... bought the week prior (the person doing this would buy flowers, return them the next week, buy more, return those a week later, and repeat. We put a stop to that)

There's a lot more, but I can't think of much more right now. I'll post again if I can think of some.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Have you found one of those that actually works?

I've tried two such machines, seeing as I have three indoors cats. I felt bad about returning them, so I didn't, but neither of them work properly.

We had two of those back when they first came out and they were nothing short of a royal PITA.

Not only would the teeth get gunked up (and the owner's manual said that litter consistency could play a role in that) but there were times one of them would suddenly start working on its own or the sensor would not notice that the cat was out of the box before it would start moving the bar.

I found two brands of litter that worked halfway decent with those things: Arm & Hammer or Fresh Scoop. So that helped with that - somewhat.

A few months later, the motor burned out in one of them. The second one we simply got rid of too - it was just too much trouble to take the thing apart and clean the teeth out.

The older cats we had at the time didn't like the electic boxes . . .so we kept a regular box as well for them.

The kittens, however, had a ball with those things. They'd get into the boxes, do their business, then jump up onto the top of the bar and RIDE THE BAR as it would move back and forth to clean out the litter.

[LibraryLady]

This is nothing compared to the other stories on this thread but it did make us scratch our heads.

About 3 years ago we sent a book out on Inter-Library Loan to a major university. It was to be there for 6 weeks It was never returned and we were never compensated for the loss.

Last week we got it back. Where did it come from? It was found in the book drop of a branch library of Brooklyn Public. Good Grief, Charley Brown! What were they thinking?

[RetailKate]

Oookay. While I can't come close to beating some of these I still have some great ones!
I used to work customer service for a smallish clothing chain in a college town. The thing was, we were required to take back anything no matter how long they had had it, and would have to replace anything you brought in. Needless to say we had a ton of people taking advantage of that.
Here goes.

1. A FULL bag of ladies underwear that stunk to high hell! It seriously smelled like she had some funk down there, and was incontenent.

2. A pair of pants a woman claimed fit when she bought them but then shrunk when they were washed. The pants were size 4. The lady? Size truck.

3.A tuxedo rental that come back smelling of pot with lipstick EVERYWHERE. Litterally, this guy, whoever he was, had the horniest little minx with him on prom night! And I think she honestly took a few breaks to reapply lipstick during her "Kissing" of him.

4. 5 shirts that were returned with lactation stains all over the front. Now, I do sympathise about the whole lactaion thing. I've been there, I know the lovely feeling of, "I'm leaking....arn't I...." But you CAN control it, or all least cover it long enough to try on a shirt! And if it must come back, wash the damn thing. Lactation is a bodily fluid. We all know the rules for body fluids...

Thats all I can think of at the moment, I'm sure there were worst ones at Wal-Mart, but thankfully I was always far away from the returns. Deep in the bowles of the TLE.

[Dark Psion]

We have had many people try to return their old kitchen faucet in the new faucet's box, but my favorite was the box with a clock in it. When caught he said it was a gift and his wife must have been planning to wrap it in that box.

Right (and it was an ugly clock)

Other than that we have had;

Old sneakers in work boot boxes.

Wal Mart's "Good Value" labled merchandise and we are a "True Value".

Items 5 to 10 years old (our old lables had a date hidden in the numbers).

Dead plants and trees that the boss allowed back. Most were just not watered but one tree had been assalted by a weed eater, possibly by Jason Vorhees.

We also had a few repeat offenders on returns;

There was the water hose lady who would return her hose every spring to get a new one because it had a lifetime warrenty.

There was the OCD paint lady who would come back a dozen times because the color wasn't just right.

There was the lady who tried to return a bag of dog food her mother bought for her starving dog so she could get some drug money. She was refused and then went to a cashier's home and told her to call the store and tell them to give her the money!


But my all time favorite return was way back when I worked at a nursery. A man tried to return a Christmas Tree, well after Christmas.

Why?

Beacuse he tried to plant it and it didn't grow!!

[mattm04]

A lady returned a birthday cake that was about 99% eaten. She claimed it was stale, despite being picked up at 6PM the day before and made at 3PM.

They let he return it. She did this a total of THREE times. Each time a similar about of cake was left. They finally stopped that.

[malmalthekiller]

I work at walmart too, so I've had some similar things that have already been mentioned.

The grossest thing that happened to me lately is this:

One of those ped eggs that are advertised on TV. Used. And full of foot shavings.

I refused to touch it.

[Snowbird]

I mostly had books, CD's, and DVD's returned that looked as if they'd been dragged behind a car on the highway, and was told that they bought them in that condition. I think not! I checked in each and every single one of those things, tyvm!

It's not gross but probably my most disheartening return had to be a book that looked as if it had been well read, then dog-earred, the spine cracked in at least a dozen places(and it wasn't a thick book), the cover curling back, and last but not least, as if the buyer had mistaken it for a doughnut and dunked it in a cup of coffee. The worst part? The one returning it was my assistant manager.

[Eric the Grey]

I can't even begin to come close to most of these stories, but I did see my share of nasty returns when I worked at the car rental agency.

When I first started working, I lived in Ridgcrest CA. It's a little town in the high desert. I worked detailing the vehicles that came back.

Quite often, we would get in cars, Jeeps and even Cadillacs that were caked, inside and out with dust from the dirt roads in the area.

I had one that came back that had the entire trunk caked in something, and smelled like a dead body. The renters actually told the rental agent that they had gone hunting with it... That one got sent to the LA office for cleaning. I feel sorry for the person who had to drive it.

The one that made me go Huh the most was a Cadillac that came back fairly clean, except for a partial box of 257 hollow-point bullets left on the floor of the back seat.


Eric the Grey

[Shironu-Akaineko]

The great Canadian MoldKing.



Need I say more?

[Ree]

What the hell was that thing originally?

[PossJB]

If I'm not mistaken, that is a waste of a good cheese cake.