Joe Kueser's Blog Another Geek Finding His Place on the Web

Books-A-Million, You’re Dead To Me! Dead!

I live in the “suburbs” of Joplin, so basically in the middle of the middle of nowhere. In this berg, only one book store, Books A Million. Because I like to support our local economy, especially around Christmas, I decided to purchase a couple of books from them. I was there, the books I wanted to by were there, the stars were aligned just right, so why not?

These books were Christmas gifts for my son. He’d been getting into Christopher Moore, one of my favorite authors, so I thought I’d get him a couple of books to feed his addiction. Unfortunately, they were the same two books that I had bought him 6 months ago. The exact same books. Oops!

I still had the Books A Million bag handy, so when we were headed out December 26, I grabbed the books, and the bag, and stopped by Books A Million with the intention of exchanging the books for 2 more books by the same author. No problem, right? Wrong!

When I got to the counter, both sets of books in hand, the mousy woman first told me that the only way I could exchange the books was if I was a Discount Card holder. I explained that I was, but that I had let my membership lapse. So she said, “Well, then, I don’t think we can do the exchange. Do you have a receipt?” I said, “I can probably dig it up if I have to, but no, I don’t have it with me. It’s an even exchange, if that makes a difference.”

She told me, “Oh, no, I’m going to have to get the manager. I don’t think we can exchange them without a receipt.” So she called her manager and I waited semi-patiently. While we were waiting, I said, “You know, I know it’s not your policy, but having a policy like this is libel to drive customers away. It seems like with price already being a compelling reason to turn to Amazon, you would at least have better customer service.” She replied with, “We’re not worried about that, we beat out Amazon 5 to 1”. She didn’t elaborate on that, but that’s about the time they lost me.

The manager came to the register and confirmed that, indeed, they would not, could not, take an exchange without the receipt. “The machine won’t even let us do anything without a receipt!” I said, “I can go home and dig up the receipt if it’s really necessary, but am not real happy about doing that, given the weather.” He said, “Well, I’m afraid that’s what you’re going to have to do. Well, I guess if you remember the exact date and time that you bought the books, I could probably look them up, but it might take me a couple of hours to find your receipt in our system.”

Not wanting to wait around for 2 hours, gambling on the off chance that I may guess the correct date and time of my purchase, I headed home and dug up my receipt.

I then returned the books, with receipt in hand, and got a full refund, and ordered the replacement books from Amazon.com right there from the Books A Million register.

Oh, and if you live in the Joplin area and need some books, give me a holler. I may be able to add your order to mine and get you free shipping from Amazon.com. Anything to help put another nail in Books A Million’s coffin.