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Jan. 7th, 2010
on customer service: an old tale
Jan. 7th, 2010 11:13 pmI was having a conversation with my daycare provider yesterday in which we were talking about customer service problems (from both a consumer and a retail perspective) and in telling a story I mentioned the "Cabbage Patch Kids Doll Craze". Only later as I was driving away did it occur to me that the Cabbage Patch Doll Craze happened in the early- to mid-1980's, and therefore my DCP was probably far too young to have any substantive memory of the event.
(Which thought, of course, immediately made me feel old. I forget sometimes I'm not still in my mid-20s, a hazard of being a generally immature person living in a college town.)
In any event, since then there have been several obsessive, people-trampling-each-other-in-stores holiday items: Tickle-Me Elmo was the next big one I can think of after the Cabbage Patch Dolls, and I'm led to understand that there was some stupid hamster toy this year that people were paying outrageous bucks for that are already down to $8 in most stores post-holiday. But I believe that the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were the first of that particular phenomenon and noteworthy as such [1]. The story I told my DCP actually related to the *second* year of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, which was close to the first year in terms of general consumer insanity, but had the added bonus of rumors floating around that there were counterfeit dolls from China being sold as the real thing in some places and that, oooooh!, the fake dolls were flammable and could kill your children. (This may also be one of the earliest mass-fear-of-Chinese-products scares, I don't know.)
Well, anyhow. At that time I was working a seasonal job for the holidays at the (now non-existent) catalog department of a major US department store (think: rhymes with "Cheers"). I was in high school, it was my second job ever, and was the first job where I ever worked an eight-hour shift. Mostly I answered the phone and took orders, which was pretty much non-stop: in general, by the time someone got through to one of us, they'd usually been on hold for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes. (Another digression[2].)
That year, obviously trying to profit off the previous year's craze, we featured Cabbage Patch Kids in our holiday catalog. They sold out somewhere around the start of September less than a week after the catalog came out, which made for many, many hundreds of people trying to order them throughout that fall that couldn't. A lot of people would plead with us to go look around our stock room and see if there were any extras -- people were desperate -- but of course, no, they were sold out. I even had one woman cry at me because she couldn't get one, and there were others who weren't far from that.
However, in point of fact, there was one in our stock room. A man had ordered it back before they'd run out, and we'd called and left messages that his order was in every week or so after it had come in, and it just sat on our shelf waiting for him while all these sad and pleading people had to be turned away. As it was, the man didn't come in to pick it up until December 23rd. It was the one day of the entire season where I worked the front desk (because of a personnel shortage) so I was there when he finally came in. I wasn't the clerk who waited on him, but needless to say, we were very curious about him after months of watching that coveted item languish on our shelves so we were all lurking around during the transaction.
The clerk who waited on him retrieved it out of the back room and rang it up. After the gentleman paid, the clerk put it in a bag, handed the man his receipt, and slid the bag with the doll it in across the counter to him.
The man then took the doll back out of the bag, studied it a long moment, then took it out of its box. Another minute of studying it, and then the man declared, with a certain aha, got you! tone, that the doll looked fake. Then he pulled a cigarette lighter from his coat pocket and lit the doll's leg on fire.
The leg sort of blackened a bit, and then went out.
The man looked at it another minute or two, then said, "I guess it's real." Then he put it back in its box, put the box back in its bag, slid it back across the counter to my fellow clerk and said, "I'd like to exchange this."
...
We declined. He took it all the way up to the store manager, yelling the whole way, with no luck. It's not like we had another one anyway, but seriously, lighting product on fire in front of the store's employees just really reduces your chances of getting sympathy from anyone.
I always wondered about that guy's kid, though, getting this slightly-burnt doll for the holidays. What a great dad.
---
[1] And are also noteworthy in that the creators are apparently deeply, deeply creepy. (There's precedent there was well, as apparently the guy who designed Tickle-Me-Elmo was, for a very long time, one the FBI's top suspects for being the Unibomber.)
[2] Probably the most significant lesson of that job -- and perhaps the most significant lesson I've ever learned as a working person -- was that we had a list of about a dozen elderly women who would regularly call the catalog department and place long, rambling, somewhat nonsensical orders because they were that desperate just to have someone to talk to. They didn't want the merchandise, and if you put the order through when it came in they'd invariably tell you they'd changed their minds and didn't want it. They just were so absolutely, unbelievably lonely that calling the store's catalog department was the closest they could get to human interaction. Generally we were told to be polite but hurry them off the line as quickly as we could (not out of callousness, I think, just out of the sheer volume of calls typically backed up in our system at that time of year) but I really couldn't bring myself to disconnect on them and would talk to them for a bit. Hey, I was like 16 or 17, my job was going away in a month, and it seemed the right thing to do. I had not been aware, up until that moment, how isolated and lonely some people could be, and I've never forgotten it.
(Which thought, of course, immediately made me feel old. I forget sometimes I'm not still in my mid-20s, a hazard of being a generally immature person living in a college town.)
In any event, since then there have been several obsessive, people-trampling-each-other-in-stores holiday items: Tickle-Me Elmo was the next big one I can think of after the Cabbage Patch Dolls, and I'm led to understand that there was some stupid hamster toy this year that people were paying outrageous bucks for that are already down to $8 in most stores post-holiday. But I believe that the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were the first of that particular phenomenon and noteworthy as such [1]. The story I told my DCP actually related to the *second* year of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, which was close to the first year in terms of general consumer insanity, but had the added bonus of rumors floating around that there were counterfeit dolls from China being sold as the real thing in some places and that, oooooh!, the fake dolls were flammable and could kill your children. (This may also be one of the earliest mass-fear-of-Chinese-products scares, I don't know.)
Well, anyhow. At that time I was working a seasonal job for the holidays at the (now non-existent) catalog department of a major US department store (think: rhymes with "Cheers"). I was in high school, it was my second job ever, and was the first job where I ever worked an eight-hour shift. Mostly I answered the phone and took orders, which was pretty much non-stop: in general, by the time someone got through to one of us, they'd usually been on hold for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes. (Another digression[2].)
That year, obviously trying to profit off the previous year's craze, we featured Cabbage Patch Kids in our holiday catalog. They sold out somewhere around the start of September less than a week after the catalog came out, which made for many, many hundreds of people trying to order them throughout that fall that couldn't. A lot of people would plead with us to go look around our stock room and see if there were any extras -- people were desperate -- but of course, no, they were sold out. I even had one woman cry at me because she couldn't get one, and there were others who weren't far from that.
However, in point of fact, there was one in our stock room. A man had ordered it back before they'd run out, and we'd called and left messages that his order was in every week or so after it had come in, and it just sat on our shelf waiting for him while all these sad and pleading people had to be turned away. As it was, the man didn't come in to pick it up until December 23rd. It was the one day of the entire season where I worked the front desk (because of a personnel shortage) so I was there when he finally came in. I wasn't the clerk who waited on him, but needless to say, we were very curious about him after months of watching that coveted item languish on our shelves so we were all lurking around during the transaction.
The clerk who waited on him retrieved it out of the back room and rang it up. After the gentleman paid, the clerk put it in a bag, handed the man his receipt, and slid the bag with the doll it in across the counter to him.
The man then took the doll back out of the bag, studied it a long moment, then took it out of its box. Another minute of studying it, and then the man declared, with a certain aha, got you! tone, that the doll looked fake. Then he pulled a cigarette lighter from his coat pocket and lit the doll's leg on fire.
The leg sort of blackened a bit, and then went out.
The man looked at it another minute or two, then said, "I guess it's real." Then he put it back in its box, put the box back in its bag, slid it back across the counter to my fellow clerk and said, "I'd like to exchange this."
...
We declined. He took it all the way up to the store manager, yelling the whole way, with no luck. It's not like we had another one anyway, but seriously, lighting product on fire in front of the store's employees just really reduces your chances of getting sympathy from anyone.
I always wondered about that guy's kid, though, getting this slightly-burnt doll for the holidays. What a great dad.
---
[1] And are also noteworthy in that the creators are apparently deeply, deeply creepy. (There's precedent there was well, as apparently the guy who designed Tickle-Me-Elmo was, for a very long time, one the FBI's top suspects for being the Unibomber.)
[2] Probably the most significant lesson of that job -- and perhaps the most significant lesson I've ever learned as a working person -- was that we had a list of about a dozen elderly women who would regularly call the catalog department and place long, rambling, somewhat nonsensical orders because they were that desperate just to have someone to talk to. They didn't want the merchandise, and if you put the order through when it came in they'd invariably tell you they'd changed their minds and didn't want it. They just were so absolutely, unbelievably lonely that calling the store's catalog department was the closest they could get to human interaction. Generally we were told to be polite but hurry them off the line as quickly as we could (not out of callousness, I think, just out of the sheer volume of calls typically backed up in our system at that time of year) but I really couldn't bring myself to disconnect on them and would talk to them for a bit. Hey, I was like 16 or 17, my job was going away in a month, and it seemed the right thing to do. I had not been aware, up until that moment, how isolated and lonely some people could be, and I've never forgotten it.