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The Worst Mattress Customer In The World

By Mitchell Endick

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 04Feb2008 Word count: 831 Viewed: 374 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

I have been selling mattresses for 25 years and I just recently experienced the worst customer of all time, for me. My store is a well known local store that still services many of the same customers since we started. I have seen mattress stores come and go in this little college town of ours and the main reason that we have outlasted them is we are reasonable people who treat our customers the way we would want to be treated. Now I do not believe in going overboard on customer service. Overboard is where you give a customer their money back for an item that they purchased elsewhere or go repair another stores furniture for free. I feel that I need to have made money on an item in order to service it. But we are honest and we take care of our customers.

Now for my worst customer. This woman purchases an upper end mattress at my store. Our policy is to be somewhat flexible on price and or service. My salesman winds up giving her free delivery for the mattress set and a free metal frame with a $50.00 price tag. She informs the sales person that she will need some help juggling this bed set with another bed set and the old bed set needs to be taken upstairs. The salesman agrees, after all this is a big sale.

My two delivery people arrive at her house and bring the new mattress set in. They are informed that the new mattress set is to be installed on her new bedroom set and the old mattress set must go upstairs and the new frame that we threw in on the deal needs to be set up and the old mattress put on it. They take the old mattress set upstairs, build the new free frame and install the set on it. Next they find out that the store that she purchased the new bedroom set from did not set the headboard and footboard up in her bedroom and she expects us to do this so we can put the new mattress set that we sold her on it. My delivery people do this without a squabble and install the new mattress set. In all, two men spend an hour in her house for no compensation. Of course when they leave after going beyond the call of duty, there is no tip.

Three weeks later she is at the sales counter of my store on a Saturday morning, demanding her money back for the mattress set that she bought because she found a better deal on a different brand somewhere else. She has been sleeping on our new mattress set all of this time but that is another story. She is informed that by Ohio law we can not sell used mattresses but she is getting more and more aggressive, literally pounding her fist on the counter with a raised voice that has other customers staring at her.

My salesman makes a correct executive decision in this matter and tells her fine, we will take the mattress set back. The other option was to call the police but then she would have cancelled her charge on her Visa card. So like a bunch of fools, we go to her house and bring the mattress set back. They also attempt to bring the $50.00 bed frame back but she refuses them entry into upstairs. The set comes back to the store and we look it over and there are no pee stains so since we can not sell it, we use it as a floor sample.

Now we have to refund the money. She absolutely refuses to compensate us for all of the labor that we burnt up in her house. Then, amazingly, she is shocked and upset that we are subtracting the fifty dollars from her refund for the bed frame she kept. Her point is that she received it free with the purchase so it was a gift and should remain free. Long story short we said too bad so sad, and deducted the fifty dollars.

I wanted to ban her from the store but I was kind of outvoted by the rest of my employees. They felt that it would be bad to add gasoline to whatever sparks were left and she might sue us. She still probably complains about us to whoever will listen. I would think about this woman, weeks later and still be angry. The soup guy in Seinfeld had some of it right. Life is too short to deal with some customers and the only way to convince some of these people how bad they are is to have them drive down a busy business street and realize that they are banned from some of the stores. It will eventually sink in. Thank goodness that we have many many good, honest customers who are grateful for our service to overshadow the occasional rat.

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