For the last three decades my everyday pants have been Dockers. They look nice enough with a polo shirt or a jacket and tie. Yet, the cost makes them almost expendable when unloading a load of past its prime produce.
I’ve long gotten my Dockers from a certain national department store (definitely not a nickel and dime outfit), buying a couple of pair each time they had a good sale.
That relationship began to sour a couple of years ago. The store went from 100% cotton polo shirts to cotton/polyester blends (heavy on the plastic), and, they stopped stocking Dockers in my size in store.
“You can always get them from us on-line,” the perky sale-ette told me.
I’m not a fan of buying pants on-line since even Dockers vary a bit in cut and fit from pair to “identical” pair. Still, I’ve had their credit card since 1979, so, I started buying them from the store’s website.
Last December ‘the good sale’ came around and (even though I don’t really “work” anymore) I ordered one pair in navy and one in black. A few days later, as promised, the package arrived. The black Dockers fit great. The navy pair were the wrong size. The packing ticket and my copy of the order had the correct size, human error stuffed the wrong pants into the package.
The local store supposedly helps with on-line orders, just not a) for items not stocked in the store, or, b) the week before Christmas. As told, I sent the wrong size pair back – using the enclosed return label – with a note and generous use of a red Sharpie on the packing slip to make it known I’d like a navy pair in the correct size.
Weeks went by. I knew from the UPS tracking that the navy pants had gone to the right place in Nevada. Still, nothing.
Like most of us, this week I finally had time to out wait a call center. The nice young lady needed a couple of runs through the explanation to understand why I was calling but she pulled-up my order. Then she went to talk with her supervisor.
About 15 minutes later she came back. The company had issued a credit against my account in late February (meaning I now have a negative balance). The call center, alas, could only suggest I re-order the pants and hope for a better outcome. I noted with determination that the ‘everyday value’ price was around $20 higher than the sale price, plus I had $12.77 invested in shipping costs. Back to the supervisor.
They had “opened a case” and sent it to ‘corporate resolution.’ I should hear something in “five to seven business days.”
The next day the company announced that they were throwing out tens of thousands of employees…‘Corporate resolution’ may no longer exist.
What’s the point?
Well, today even simple transactions like buying a pair of pants have gotten complicated. What used to be local and easy now is obtuse and distant.
Another example: the current edition of Bloomberg Business Week has a great article on the plant in Aberdeen, South Dakota where 3M makes a lot of N95 masks. [ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-25/3m-doubled-production-of-n95-face-masks-to-fight-coronavirus ] The story notes that most of the production is sold to ‘distributors.’
Now go to Forbes’ website for a March 30 story on a day in the life of one such distributor/trader. The reporter explains that with the masks in demand ‘bidders’ have to be first with their proof of money, resulting in American hospitals and health departments getting outbid, repeatedly, by foreign interests. [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2020/03/30/i-spent-a-day-in-the-coronavirus-driven-feeding-frenzy-of-n95-mask-sellers-and-buyers-and-this-is-what-i-learned/#23e0f48356d4 ] Americans work overtime to make masks America needs but can’t get.
That seems obtuse and distant too. And, wrong.
Oh, I did buy a couple more pair of Dockers last month. Like everyone, I had to go on Amazon.
Glenn