On Sunday evening I decided to look for a few blouses and a pair of slacks at my favorite local thrift store, McCart Thrift, in Southwest Fort Worth. A facebook friend has a blog and shows the great results she gets in pairing thrifted garments – I wanted to give it a try. I walked in the front door a couple of minutes after 6pm, knowing that they closed at 7pm.
Shopping in a thrift store, especially one so well-stocked, is a time-consuming process. They’ve recently separated out some of their sizes – the letter sizes (X 2,3, etc) are now off on their own racks, so after realizing all of those were too big (I still wear a number size, though it is a larger number than I like) I found my sections and had a fair stack in my cart. At 6:30pm, without warning, an announcement in English and Spanish said the dressing rooms were closed.
That couldn’t be right – the store was open for 30 more minutes. Who in their right mind would buy clothes without trying them on? I finished the row I was shopping and asked about the dressing rooms. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?
“No. They’re closed.”
“No exceptions?”
“No exceptions.”
“How to you expect anyone to buy anything they’ve picked up if you won’t let them try them on?”
No answer, no sympathetic apology. The clerk pointed out the managers, and I caught up with one as she was putting items up on racks.
The ensuing conversation was not a happy one. I asked if they would let me try on the items in my cart – I can do it quickly, I’d be finished well before their registers closed. A mouthy assistant kept saying “it’s the rule. The dressing rooms close at 6:30pm” and “if we let you use them, everyone else would want to also.” Well, yes, I thought, most people want to try on the clothes they are going to buy.
They were truculent, adamant, and frankly, gave me a sinking feeling. Was I wrong about this great store? Would I have to stop shopping here? Why were they so hostile to a reasonable request? I ended up both angry and embarrassed to have to confront them that way, and to receive the party line in such a frankly knee-jerk, defensive way. I was reasonable, I was polite, but terse. I didn’t shout, and I wondered what well-reasoned argument was going to convince them to let me try on the clothes I’d been selecting for the last 35 minutes?
They do sell clothes, right? And they do let people in the door right up until 7pm, right? So why don’t they let people try on the garments they select? “Do you mean that you’re willing to leave those dressing room doors locked and let me walk away from this cart full of garments that you will then have to put back out on the racks instead of selling them?”
“Yes.”
So I gave the cart enough of a shove to let it roll a couple of feet and I walked off, extremely disappointed. I spoke to the second manager at the register, and told her that their nutty policy just caused me to waste an hour of my time, caused me to walk away from a sale that would have added up to about $50, and caused the work for them to put everything back on the racks. What kind of useful management strategy is that?
This is small potatoes in the world of customer service. It isn’t something the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Watchdog columnist Dave Lieber is going to waste his time on (though I will invoke his name so that if enough people complain, maybe he’ll notice). It’s the kind of entrenched policy that deserves that scrutiny. Who does it serve? No one. What bothers me is the sense of superiority they conveyed, the impression that they look down on people who make the choice (or have no choice) to shop in a thrift store. I wanted to think about it from their standpoint – is this policy intended so that employees will be able to clock out at 7:01 and walk out the door? In my experience, there is at least an extra hour of work involved in retail work, the clearing up, straightening, and re-stocking after the doors close. Does that not happen here? It simply makes no sense to let people in the doors at 6pm if you’re not going to treat them with the same respect as customers who walked in the door at noon.
If the hours of operation are published on the door (and they are) then one should be able to go through the reasonable steps of selecting, trying on, and purchasing the garments up until 7pm. The simple answer would be to make several announcements about when the store and the dressing rooms close (and make it more reasonable – dressing rooms could close 10 minutes before closing to allow time for standing in line to make the purchase).
I want to keep shopping at McCart Thrift, but the surly employee attitude and the embarrassment of meeting that unreasonable wall of resistance when making a reasonable request will make me think twice. It’s time for the management down there to get smart, start acting like a regular retail establishment. Their hasty closure of dressing rooms amounted to a waste of time for me. It’s not like I’m there for long, anyway – I always time my visits carefully because you can only shop till your bladder is full – they provide no public restrooms, despite the fact that the building most certainly had public restrooms in its previous life as a WinnDixie grocery store.
That’s another essay, but that is also strike two.
