An Open Letter To The Super Target of Woodbury. Slash I’m A Mad Mom.

I realize that I owe you guys part two of the blogging series today – and I will get that to you this afternoon, I promise! But something else is taking precedence this morning – mainly in the form of a little mommy rant about an experience that I had with my local Target store this week. So without further ado, here’s why my local store failed me {again} this week.

Dear Super Target of Woodbury,

I want to love shopping at your store. I really do. I mean, I grew up shopping at Target. You’re a local brand – and I love that. But there are a lot of things that I have overlooked while continuing to use you as my main shopping source. And this week, you really topped the cake. To the point where I’m not so sure that I can continue shopping with you.

On Sunday, your cashier didn’t give me all of the items that I paid for. And initially, I didn’t realize it. But two days later, my five month old baby was screaming. He’s teething you see – which is why I purchased that baby acetaminophin when I was in the store over the weekend. But low and behold, I could not find the medicine anywhere. I thought that I was crazy and maybe I hadn’t actually bought it, spent forty-five minutes soothing my crying baby to sleep and resolved to purchase more the next time I stopped in.

The following night, I realized we were missing the white board markers that I knew I had purchased – because the hubs and I spent five entire minutes in the store {which is an eternity when you’re shopping with an infant} figuring out which pack would work best on the new whiteboard that my hubs installed in our office. So I called. And it turned out that you had the items I was missing “at the service desk”. And just so that you know, this is the third time that this has happened at your store in three months. It has never happened to me at any other Target store.

So I stopped in last night to pick up my items. It took the girl at the counter ten minutes to just figure out where my receipt was. It turns out that you didn’t hold my items at the counter, even though I said I would come in to get them. You put them back out on the floor to sell them to another patron. Now, if you’re going to re-sell the items that I already paid you for, you refunded my credit card for those items, right? I mean, you knew whose items they were, you had my receipt. NOPE. Wrong. You kept the money that you already collected from me. But sent my items out to be paid for by a second customer.

Well, Target, this is WRONG. I know that there have been times when I’ve thought that I purchased an item, got home and days later realized it wasn’t in my house. I know that in many of those cases I’ve just re-purcahsed the same item the next time I’ve come into your store. And so, if the practice above is a regular thing for you – which the manager who assisted me said that it was – you’re basically double dipping on the revenue of these products from your customers on a regular basis.

Now, a couple of items that add up to six bucks may not sound like a ton of money, but this has happened to me three times in the last three months. And your store manager tells me that this is just a regular occurance – which tells me that you’re making quite a bit of extra cash with this little operation. And since this has happened to me multiple times – and your store seemed very unconcerned about it – it leaves me wondering: is this a practice you could actually promote within your store?

When your store manager finally realized that I was quite perturbed by her answers, she gave me a three dollar coupon to use in the store. Gee, thanks Super Target. A whole three dollars sure makes me feel better about 1) not getting all of my items after I paid for them 2) having to put my child through a painful experience because you failed to give me all of the items I purchased and 3) having to drag my child out of the house in five degree weather to fix your mistake. Yep, that really entices me to continue shopping with you.

It kills me to think this way – because like I said, I LOVE Target with all my heart – but I’m actually considering switching my loyalties to Walmart after this incident. Had you handled this better in the store, maybe I would feel differently. But I guess we’ll never know.

Signed,
A very unhappy customer

{Slash Cortney from The Mommyhood Project}

Tell me in the comments: Have YOU ever not received all of the items you paid for at a store? How did they handle it?