They all think they’re bankers now

As a woman, I’m ‘supposed’ to love shopping, but it’s not actually something I enjoy very much, so a recent trip into town was made easier by skipping the high street and bolting up the side streets directly to my chosen department store. It was relatively peaceful and my husband and I had an enjoyable shopping experience, the staff were friendly and helpful without being a nuisance and we even enjoyed a chair massage while waiting for the checkout queue to decrease.

Then the cashier suggested I “sign up for a store card today to enjoy 10% off” and handed me a leaflet that also advertised the stores credit card, my husband thought me slightly neurotic when I made a repeated point that I didn’t care for a credit card and the store card would do just fine. The cashier reassured me and we left happy.

One week later the pin number for my credit card arrived…upon calling the customer service number, I was told that the cashier obviously hadn’t listened to me and had not opened a store card at all, but a credit card which I could enjoy at 26.9% APR! The balance was also vastly different. Confused? Concerned. How many people sign up for store cards and end up with credit cards with balances that are different to the actual credit amount? Is anyone left who wonders why we’re in a credit crunch?! At what cost are department stores getting people to sign up for credit cards when ‘selling’ it as a store card, sadly it’s ruined a perfectly good in-store customer experience and probably out of principle I will not ever return to that store.

I can only hold myself responsible for drifting through the checkout process believing I’d signed up for what had been suggested to me. There are plenty of other department stores who can offer me exactly the same customer experience, although I’ll forego the 10% off and keep my customer experience as a good one.

It reminds me of a blog on ‘Lazy customers‘ which perhaps I can now be classified as!