Right off the bat, credit where credit’s due. This was Leslie’s idea, and it goes back several years – in fact, it’s already become a wink-and-nod family joke whenever we encounter a worthy example for membership.
T.H.E. Club is open to anyone who thinks with that portion of your brain in which you typically find common sense. It stands for Too High Expectations. However, institutional membership is awarded to businesses, organizations, even individuals who do exactly the opposite... in other words, who treat “common sense” as a train travelling entirely the opposite direction as the train on which the awardee is travelling.
(Photo: Clara Hughes, pedalmag.com)
Now I’m not talking about the kind of expectations that, for example, are shouldered by Canadian athletes in the Olympics – the “whole-country-is-counting-on-you-to-win-gold” type of expectations. I’m talking about simple, ordinary, day-to-day events in which one or more participants appear on a given day to have left common sense at home sitting among the cold toast crusts and half a cup of coffee left over from breakfast, rather than take it to work with them today.
I’m talking about the kind of thing that sometimes seems so opposite to common sense, it leaves you scratching your head and wondering, “What the [obscenity of your choice] were they thinking?!!”
In other words, T.H.E. Club is an absolutely perfect subject for a blog mostly about whining. So to repeat: not earth-shattering or world-changing expectations. Just plain ol’ common sense.
A recent example will illustrate what I mean. (And of course the yarn takes a few paragraphs. After all, I’m still recently ex-Government of Canada Communications. Why use a few words when a few dozen paragraphs will do?)
During a recent visit to one of Ottawa / Gloucester’s Mark’s Work Wear houses – specifically the one at 1940 Innes Road – I was drawn to a large table on which two large signs were posted advertising “All T-shirts on this table: 2 / $20”. Since T-shirts are pretty much my summer casual shirt wear of choice, I selected four and headed for the cash.
As the cashier rang them through, I noticed that each shirt was showing an individual (non-sale) price, ranging from a high of $18.99 to a low of $11.99. When I pointed it out to the cashier, he looked closely at each of the shirts, then informed me, “these are different styles”, as if that fully and satisfactorily explained it.
So I told him that all four came from the table where the special price was openly advertised in-store – and for good measure pointed to the table, which was visible from the cash and which displayed the several “different” styles. He took all four shirts over and checked them and several others on the same table. When he came back to the cash, he entered a special code on the machine and proceeded to start ringing them through again.
Then he informed me that because each of the four I had picked was “oversized”, there would be an additional cost per shirt that effectively added 10 per cent to the cost of each.
There are several things that, to me, are just plain wrong about how this sale was handled.
First, to my perhaps overly-expectant mind, the cash register should have been auto-programmed to accept each and every shirt placed on that sale table at the sale price advertised. (Every time two are checked through, the bill shows $20.)
Secondly, the shirts’ “styles” should never even have been mentioned. Regardless of style, they had all been placed on that sale table. (T-shirts, fer crapssakes – they look like the letter “T” when hanging on your clothesline – hence their name. How many style variations can you have?)
But what especially annoyed me was the added premium on an “oversized” T-shirt – an additional cost mentioned absolutely nowhere on any in-store advertising and which was drawn to my attention only verbally by the cashier.
For the record, I suppose I am “oversized” in Mark’s corporate eyes. Plus I quite deliberately choose casual wear like T-shirts so as to be loose fitting, which adds to their “breathability” and comfort on a hot day. Specifically, I buy XXL in such clothing.
However, regardless of why I choose to wear what Mark’s calls “oversized”, to me the apparently arbitrary addition of an extra cost is inappropriate at best and, at worst, smacks of a “bait and switch” model of retailing whereby a deliberately lower price is advertised to draw a customer in, only to have him find that said price does not apply to what he wished to purchase.
As I see it, if Mark’s – or anyone for that matter – is going to add a premium to “oversized” clothing on sale, then those items should be collected on a separate sales surface with a clearly worded poster or sign advertising that said items are $X.00 extra because they are “oversized”.
Now I like Mark’s products. The labels on almost all my clothing are either Denver Hayes or Wind River and, without exaggeration, this includes outer wear for all seasons, underwear, casual and “business casual” clothing, recreational, sportswear, accessories such as belts, toques, gloves / mittens, rainwear, shoes and heavy-duty winter boots, even LED flashlights and refillable water bottles. At Mark’s, despite apparently now being (who knew?) “oversized”, I still almost always find at least a measure of colour choice in their men’s wear.
At the end of the day, I bought the T-shirts. Even with the “oversized” premium, they were a reasonable price. But it bothered me that I had to argue my way into being charged the in-store advertised sale price because the cash register initially had not been programmed to accept it.
I was also borderline angry – certainly frustrated – at having to be essentially challenged by a sales representative who made me feel slightly less than honest for having claimed to have selected them from a sales table when his machine did not acknowledge the sales price.
And honestly (just to run the whine out completely), this is the first time in any Mark’s store that I have ever run up against an XXL product costing more than an advertised price. On those very few occasions where I have run into an “oversized” premium, it has never been in a Mark’s store, but it has always been advertised in-store and typically it has kicked in at an XXXXL or even XXXXXL size.
(Photo: Kreaser.co.uk)
Needless to say, this only exacerbated my disappointment with this particular transaction.
So Mark’s (or at least 1940 Innes Road, Gloucester, Mark’s) – for failing to meet the basic, but wholly reasonable, expectation of a customer’s thinking that items advertised for a certain price would actually be sold at that price, but most especially for making a long-time customer feel somehow unclean for pursuing that expectation, I am pleased to use you as the inaugural inductee into our Baby Duck all-new T.H.E. Club.
T.H.E. Club: Where did common sense go on any given day at any given time in any given place?
(And if you haven’t figured it out by now, the institutional "T.H.E. Club" label is applied with dripping sarcasm.)
So let me throw open an invitation: if anyone else out there has run up against a perfectly ordinary set of expectations that seemed to slip beyond the wholly reasonable ability of someone to deliver, vent away! The field is yours. Send me an e-mail at mdicola520@rogers.com and I’ll add it in a future whine, with due attribution. Or add a note in the comments. And if one day you see someone sporting a button that says simply “T.H.E.” or “T.H.E. Club”, you’ll know it’s catching on.
After all, we boomers really are a whiny lot, but we do come from a generation of parents who lived and breathed common sense. To our minds, it’s not an unreasonable expectation. But from the way some people / businesses act, you’d think that providing common sense demanded an effort on a par with summiting K-2.
À la prochaine.
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