DIYbanter - View Single Post

mm

On Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:26:41 -0400, wrote:

HD is one of those companies. They slammed a friend of mine with a
restocking charge but she actually took back more than she kept over a
6 month period. She would go buy 2 or 3 things, take them home and
look at them in her house and choose the one she liked best, taking
the others back.
Her name was on the abuser list.

When I was a boy, in the 50's, we lived in a small city of 50,000 in
western Pa. My mother usually had a car**, but still, when there was
a sale in the newspaper, like on purses, and she didn't want to go
shopping, she would call up the department store and tell them
approximately what kind of purse she wanted, and they would deliver
maybe 3 purses, with their own delivery truck. She would look at them
for a couple days and then call them to come and get the ones she
didn't want. If she didn't want any of them, that was okay too. My
mother grew up poor and didn't spend a lot of money on clothes, but
otoh, she never went out naked (she even wore clothes at home) and
there were only two department stores in town, maybe one, so whatever
she did spend, she spent with this store. And the driver probably got
paid bupkes (goat droppings).

Maybe your friend is the daughter, or granddaughter, of someone like
my mother.

I never had a problem but I return a very low percentage of what I
buy. That is one advantage of charging things tho. They know how good
a customer you are. If you pay cash for everything the only time they
know you is when you return something.

That's a good point. I pay cash in part because if I return something,
I feel obliged to watch my account to see if the return is credited,
yet I never do watch it. But if they ever give me a problem, I guess
I'll start charging everything.

**She had a car because my father almost always rode the bus to work,
or even walked I think. We lived in a nice pretty new n'hood but
downtown was only 1.5 miles away. In the evening he would wait for
the bus, but often a friend would drive by and give him a ride home or
at least up to our street, where it intersectw the main north-south
street. There was really only way to get to the north side. This was
in the days when the supermarket was only opend from 9 to 5 M-Sat.
Later it stayed open to 6. I don't know what my best friend's
mother, who lived across the street, did for a car during the day.
His father worked downtown too, and was 20 years younger than mine.
Maybe he walked too. I don't remember anyone having two cars, except
maybe one fairly rich family we knew, my mother's best friend. They
owned a dry goods store. They lived another 7 blocks north.