Oh how the saga continued…

I managed to reserve a pink DSlite at Argos last night. Well actually I reserved two as the first one didn’t send a confirming email so I didn’t have the reservation number. That isn’t the first time it’s happened from something from Argos and I can never decide if it’s because actually you haven’t reserved one after all or something has gone wrong in the email part of the process. And I never remember to write the reservation number down from the website . So there may well be one reserved in Crawley for me too but it will get dropped tomorrow and the Brighton one was nearer anyway. So all that remained was to get Woolworths to give us a cash refund instead of the credit not gift card thing they gave us yesterday so we could go and get the one from Argos. Easy yes? No!

First thing Ady got telephone numbers for all the Woolworths stores in Sussex, Hampshire and up into Surrey and as soon as they opened started ringing round to see if any of them had a pink DS in stock. None of them did and none of them had any idea when they might have any either. Woolworths head office is closed today but there was a customer service line open from 10am so he rang that. After a lengthy explanation of the problem they rang the Lancing branch where we’d taken the DS back to yesterday where the manager refused to give a refund. Ady employed a tactic he’s used before where he said he’d simply stay on the phone until either a DS we could collect today was found, or one was located and would be sent to a store we could collect it from as we had got one reserved elsewhere til the end of today and didn’t want to risk losing that if Woolworths couldn’t guarantee they could supply us with one given they were only offering us credit to use in their stores rather than a refund. It took about 20 minutes before the customer service advisor eventually came back and said he’d spoken to ‘Anthony at Lancing’ and he would refund us cash after all.

This was always suspicious so with Ady being the tenacious one on the phone but me being the scarier one in person I went to Woolworths to collect the refund. Sure enough Anthony was about 12 and looked like he’d already had a bollocking from the manager for agreeing to something that had previously been refused. All the staff seemed to be aware of ‘that’ refund and I was immediately faced with the same issue as yesterday – no they couldn’t give a cash refund as it had been purchased on a card, no it wasn’t our card and yes we did need the refund today so I could go and get the reserved DS from Argos. He was on the verge of refusing outright so I employed my well used tactic of assuring him I knew it wasn’t his fault, empathising with his frustration and then making my problem his problem by explaining about the young child at home, devastated about the loss of her Christmas present while there was one waiting for me to collect elsewhere if only Woolworths would give me back my money. I was calm and rational, saying how much I’d love to get the replacement from Woolworths excect they didn’t have any, or any idea of when they might have any and that is hard to explain to a small, upset child. He cracked, said that if it was his child he’d feel just the same, told me to ‘come with me’ and led me out of the shop, across the road, to the Natwest cashpoint opposite and took £100 out of his own account, gave it to me and assured me he’d sort out a way to get his money back but at least my daughter would have her DS back today!!! Probably the least conventional, most above and beyond the call of duty approach to Customer Service I’ve ever witnessed and certainly worthy of letters of praise to his head office (although I might not detail all the story, I’m not entirely sure how much they’d be impressed by such a deviation from text book methods :lol:) – but who cares, I got the money back!

So I whizzed over to Brighton, paid for and collected the DS from Argos and was back within the hour to deliver it to a very delighted Scarlett who we’d prepared for the possibility of a couple of weeks wait for a replacement and was being brave and stoic but really quite upset at being without it while Davies was pulling off sympathetic and caring and sharing his with her in half hour installments (totally off his own bat, bless him :)).

So hurrah – drama over!