ANOTHER RAVE

Fair Is Fair

A few weeks back I wrote a Line of Sight column about a poor customer service policy at Best Buy regarding returns. (And to clarify, because some people were confused, I wasn't looking for Best Buy to make an exception for me—I was railing against the policy in general.)

Well, fair's fair. If I'm going to complain about something bad, I should give praise to someone who's doing things right.
Two years ago, Sue bought a book at Borders. She only now got around to reading it (we have a lot of books, and sometimes our to-be-read piles grow quite large). As she neared the end, she found that her copy was marred by a printing error, and a number of pages were missing and others were repeated. In publishing terms, this was a repeated signature.

Now, after two years, she did not have a receipt. But we took it back in anyway. I went along mostly because I wanted to know what would happen. Sue showed them the book and they happily exchanged it for another exact same book, right then and there. No questions asked. Even though she bought it two years ago. Without a receipt.

As someone who's priced both, I know that the value to the retailer for a big, hardcover book (which this was) was considerably more than that of a DVD (to refer back to the Best Buy policy). Now, I'm sure that Borders will return the book to the publisher for a credit and so they're not out anything but a little clerk time (just like Best Buy could have done with my scratched DVD). In being willing to do that, they gained a lot of consumer good will.

Although I'm overall a big fan of the independent bookstores, I certainly think that Borders deserves some credit for a very customer-friendly policy. There's no question that I'll continue to shop there.

Way to go, Borders!