Refund or Replace?

Sorry it's been so long between blogs but I caught Chicken Pox and have been off for a while, however now spot free let me talk you through an experience I recently had with a tent.

Now those of you who know me personally and I guess at this point I should say Hi to Nick and Mandy who are getting married next Saturday :), will know that I am a little on the outside of enormous so squatting in a tent has never been my natural abode.

That said it's been so hot here recently that I decided to buy a 3 man tent for the garden, some time ago I bought a couple of air mattresses for when my nephews and nieces descend on me en-masse so I knew I wouldn't exactly be slumming it and I reckoned it had to be cooler in the garden than in my upstairs bedroom.

I purchased said tent from ASDA on Friday and duly set it up in the garden in 90 degree heat, it said on the packet that it would take 5 mins and as usual that's 5 mins for a team of expert tent erectors on holiday from tents-r-us, half an hour later however I did have it erected pegged down and ready for occupancy.

It was at that point I discovered that the air beds need a pump to blow up, I managed to get my mouth round the huge inlet valve, no smirking you lot, and blew them up, nearly fainted with the heat and effort but eventually I had two inflated beds in my tent.

Feeling rather pleased with myself I convinced my wife to sort out a couple of sheets and some pillows and our bedroom for the night was complete, approx 180 degrees inside but complete.

When night fell so did the temperature and eventually we spent a peaceful night asleep under the canvas.

Wow it's noisy outside !

The cats thought it was a huge toy and proceeded to jump up and down on it scaring the wife to bits, the foxes assumed it was some sort of trap and spent a good while telling each other all about it at the top of their lungs, our neighbours decided that that was the night to sit out talking till 3am and to top it all off it decided to thunderstorm on us, apart from that it was a cool and peaceful night.

The next morning I awoke with a wet foot, it's a good job the cats weren't around or we would have been playing Weeee, anyway it transpired that there was a hole in my tent dear reader, dear reader which at long last brings me to the point of the story.

I'll skip over the events of disassembling and trying to put it back in its bag, and my wife's ever so sympathetic attitude to the whole thing.

Today I took the offending tent back to ASDAs to negotiate a replacement, I walked in through the security barriers clutching my tent and my receipt straight past the non plussed security guard and headed for the Service Desk.

I queued up behind a very nice bloke who was collecting stickers for his kids presumably and was served toot suite buy a charming young lady called Marie, I explained the difficulty and she immediately offered me a refund or a replacement, no arguments, no witch hunt and with a smile.

I was surprised to say the least, I was expecting a real battle and was all ready to quote the sale of goods act 1994, essentially, the Act states that what you sell must fit its description, be fit for its purpose and be of satisfactory quality. If not the supplier is obliged to sort out the problem.

Instead of that I got a smile and a cheerful exchange of goods, why?

Well it makes excellent sense for a big retailer like ASDA to give this sort of service on many levels.

• Customers go away happy
• Less time is spent sorting issues out
• Customers who have a serious issue are more likely to let the matter drop
• companies can be fined £5000 per offence for selling out of date food for instance
• that's £5000 per item so 10 out of date items on a shelf =£50000 fine
• Companies get punitive fines for having foreign objects in things like ready meals and store cooked bread, so anything that encourages people to take a refund or replacement and let the matter drop is obviously of value.
• The marketing people can use it in their advertising
• The lawyers can use it as evidence of the company's efforts to be fair in defending cases of breach of the sale of goods act

As you can imagine the system is open to abuse by the unscrupulous but these people become known fairly quickly and soon get short shrift which keeps costs down, most of the returned goods were indeed faulty out of date or whatever so the company would have had to process the refund anyway and this way what is a fault becomes a virtue.

In short I've had excellent service as a method of self defence, now how clever is that?

John Anslow
http://www.ffriar.com/