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| - What a terrible shopping experience I had there today. Friends had bought my wife and I a wedding gift, a gift card from Williams-Sonoma. Firstly the web site wouldn't allow us to redeem it (even though they say all over the site that you can, apparently it only applies to US shoppers and not Canadians). So into the store I trekked with my list of 3 things that I couldn't buy from the site with the gift card. Sounds simple enough, right?
On arrival I was asked if I needed help, and I said yes and informed the sales woman that I had a list of specific items that I was looking for and that it even had the item numbers/SKUs. She sounded very surprised but didn't want the list I had printed that though would make life much easier, she wanted the items by name ... but only one at a time. Sooooo it all started. After 20+ minutes of waiting around and them fumbling through their inventory software they "found" the first item I was looking for in the back ... the computer told them they had 4 in stock but they were all scratching their heads as to where they would be. The sales woman brought me 3 of the 4 of them they had, apparently so I could "look" at the different ones and decide which I wanted (this was a boxed up pair of knives in a gift set). I thought it a bit strange but picked up the first box, opened it up and said "Yes, this is what I want."
After scanning in this first item the price was a good bit more than it was on the website. I asked about this and was told in a very brusk manner by the store manager (who had taken over at this point, apparently it was too much for the other employee to handle) that there was no way they could "match" the price advertised on their website, and that the price that I had on my list must be in US dollars. It was not. It took her about 10 minutes of clicking all around the website to concede that the price I showed her was indeed in Canadian dollars.
She then proceeded to tell me that she still couldn't match the price because "of course you still have to pay duty on that price" ... and the answer was no, you do not, all the prices they show on the site include all applicable duty (this is in bold in 18 point font at the top of the page which was currently open on her computer and I pointed this out to her). Then she proceeds to tell me "Oh look, see this? There's a flat rate $10 shipping charge on any items so I still can't price match that price because you have to pay shipping" ... I proceeded to ask her "So you're telling me that I have to pay a $10 shipping fee even though I'm here in the store to pick the item up?!??" ...
The arguing went along for a few more minutes with her giving me even more excuses why she couldn't possibly match the price on the website until I pulled out my phone and actually read her the statement on the website that stated that all advertised prices were valid in any Williams-Sonoma retail store. She still wasn't budging, so I asked to speak to her supervisor. When she told me that she was the store manager and didn't have a supervisor, so I then asked her to call up her head office and have THEM explain to ME why I had been standing here wasting time for over half of an hour and that it was ok for her to charge me more than the advertised price for the item in question. She finally relented and insisted on looking at the US price for the item and then using today's exchange rate in order to "fix" the price on my item -- so it turned out to be $0.61 more expensive than the website price. Luckily while all of this waiting around was happening I found the other couple of items that were on my list by myself and they didn't need price adjustments.
All-in-all one of the worst shopping experiences I've had in a long, long time. I will likely never set foot in that store again. If it had not been for the gift card that I had no choice but to redeem in their brick and mortar store I would have walked out without making the purchase.
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