I Can Give You Merchandise Credit.
I ordered some items from Target for pickup. I masked up, and went to get them.
At the store, I grabbed a couple of grocery items. I bought them, then went to get my pickup order.
I didn’t have the Target app, which apparently has an essential barcode feature for pickups. Still, they located my order and I headed out. But…
I had ordered a small wallet that was, I noticed immediately, way too big for my purposes. So I walked four feet from the pickup area to the return area.
The woman behind the counter said, “Do you have a receipt?”
“I just picked it up 20 seconds ago,” I said. “They didn’t give me a receipt.”
“Okay well, you will have to go home and within 24 hours, you’ll get a receipt. Then you can return the item.”
“But I don’t want to go home and wait for a receipt. I’m here right now! Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“I guess I can give you merchandise credit,” she said. She held up a little black card labeled merchandise return, which I could use the next time I shopped at Target.
“I don’t want to carry around an extra card,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s the only thing I can do.”
I looked at my bag of groceries, which cost way more than the $12 wallet I was trying to return. “What if I return some of these items?” I asked. “Then I can buy them again with the merchandise credit, and I won’t have to carry around the card.”
“You can do that,” said the girl. “But you can only use $75 a year of merchandise credit.”
“Huh?”
“Well if you have to return something else this year, you might go over your limit. You can only spend $75 a year on one of these cards.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Someone walked by and said, “Just give her the card.” This made both of us happy.
She “returned” the little wallet.
Meanwhile I pulled out a couple of things from my grocery bag, which she also “returned.” Then I watched her re-scan and “buy” the grocery items.
Finally, she handed me my receipt – and my little black gift card. “You have $12.22 on the card,” she said.
“I still have to carry the card?” I asked, perplexed.
“Sorry!” she said. “It didn’t come out even.”
I took the gift card, and picked up my bag of returned-then-bought-again things. I was too tired to argue.
I was halfway to the car before I realized what had happened.
She’d returned the grocery items as merchandise credit, instead of crediting my account. Then she “bought” them again with the same merchandise credit. So I still had to carry around the little black gift card.
Worse yet, I got back slightly less than what the item actually cost. That’s because when I bought the grocery items, I’d used my Target credit card and gotten a 5% discount. So I paid more for the same items the second time I bought them.
I didn’t have the energy to go back inside and re-do everything. I puzzled and moaned the whole way home, but I’d reached my limit. Let them keep their 75 cents.
I forgot all about it … for three days. Then, out of the blue, I got an email from Target.
The email said: We have refunded the full cost of your order. Thank you for shopping at Target!
I am not even going to ask.