My lovely girlfriend and I were out trying to find some good boxing day sales earlier this week. We made away OK, but of course, I sunk a little deeper into debt. Ah well, I got some nice shirts in the process so it was all worth it in the end.
We stopped for a high-quality meal at Burger King, and after going back in to get my second burger, we decided to stop by the DVD store that had newly opened across the street. After all, they had a big sign on the window that said "grand opening – boxing day sales!" so, it’s a win-win.
There was noone there. Let me shed some insight into why – or, at least, my opinion why.
First off, the DVD organization was horrible. If you walked along the wall (which was large racks of cases in alphabetical order), your eyes got terribly lost, very quickly. Then, you needed to contend with the DVD islands. These islands were organized into strange groupings, that wouldn’t be so strange if all movies were arranged that way. They just weren’t groups you’d see everyday. Things such as silent films, all Canadian, box sets, etc… all appeared. There wasn’t really a top-40 section per se, or new releases. Everything was kind of mashed.
This is bad news; if the store made it easy to find the DVD’s they were looking for instead of getting confused and feeling dwarfed by the number of items, they’d make more money.
Now, we found some movies we wanted to buy. They were good, and I would have loved to be sure. We got up to the front, I gave them the worn out MasterCard, and voila — didn’t work. Tried it again, and same thing. This went on for another 5 tries before I offered up by debit card. Same thing, nothing was working. OK, the guy at the counter tries changing the phone line, try again (MasterCard & Debit Card), and nothing.
Now, what would I do here? As a manager, I’d make sure that the clerk had the ability to say, "hey, we’re really sorry that you couldn’t complete your purchase. You have three DVD’s here — take one for free, and we’ll put the others on hold for you to come back."
Did they do that? Nope. They put all the DVD’s on hold. Will I go back? No way. They were nice, don’t get me wrong — just not as on the ball as I would’ve expected, especially when the store just opened, and you could still smell the newness. Oh well, I’ll make sure to pick-up what I was going to at another store in the near future.
Oh, and my girlfriend (the lovely one mentioned at the top of the post) found the BEST thing ever. There’s a Canadian clothing company called Smart Set that had an amazing ad campaign run in the Summer / Fall of this year. The song was custom-written for the ad, so you could never get it. Well — they released it for download, and three others from their campaign as well. Go to their site and click on "Fun Extras" in the Flash menu on the right, and then "Download the Music" — enjoy. The prime pick is You Are So Beautiful.
I’m off to get some Kraft Dinner. Oh yah, baby.
