THE CINDERELLA EFFECT

Nordstrom is known for excellence in customer service. Nothing’s perfect, and there are slip ups here and there, but they deserve that reputation most of the time. Except for the time that customer service fell by the wayside when they had me play out the Cinderella story over a pair of shoes.

i have small feet. That’s a good thing since they don’t make me look clunky and I don’t trip over them. (Except when I’m dancing—which is a blessedly rare event. Not a pretty sight.) The store didn’t have my size so I ordered them online. When I went online, I noticed that a competitor had the same shoe for two thirds of the Nordstrom price. Nordstrom is generally good about price matching. They even scout out competitors and program lower competitor prices into their system so that the prices can be automatically matched. They hadn’t seen this competitor's pricing, but when I told the agent about it, she checked their website. As it turned out, they had every size but mine. The agent refused to match the price. She read me the Nordstrom price matching policy, which says that the item must be the same size, color, style, etc.  That makes sense most of the time. I had found an outlet for this brand online, where the price was less than half of the Nordstrom price. But I didn’t ask for that price because that site was showing random sizes and colors in stock, and I didn’t think that it was fair to ask a full service retailer to match the bargain basement outlet price when the stock was very different. But with the other competitor, they were only missing one size—mine.

The agent said that Nordstrom wanted to be “fair to all customers” and couldn’t adjust my shoe price because my size was missing in the competitor's inventory. That didn’t make sense to me. Fair?? Imagine 100 people banging down Nordstrom’s doors to get a price adjustment. And Nordstrom would say to each, “Okay, we’ll adjust the price.” Then, they’d get to me. “But not for you", they’d say. Is this fair? It looked like this Cinderella wasn’t getting to the ball that night.

Of course, I didn’t stop with the agent, but went to her supervisor, then to a manager. Much policy babble and poor customer service. I decided that I’d order the shoes anyway, not wanting to cut off my nose to spite my feet. I'd deal with the pricing later. I asked for the manager above the manager. She said that she was the highest one on site. Yeah, really?? Let me re-phrase that.  “Who do you report to?” I got a first name, but the last name, phone number and work hours were top secret. Aside from the poor service up to this point, this little snit also had me wait on Hold for over 5 minutes to get the order number. Add that to Cinderella’s trials and tribulations.

Surprisingly, the snitty manager did tell her superior about the incident. This didn’t excuse her obnoxious behavior. I guess that my tenacity was obvious and she understood that I’d get there somehow anyway. The Operations Manager was concerned about my complaint about the manager below her and agreed to address that problem. She heard me on the price adjustment issue but explained policy again. I didn’t want to hear policy. Policies are guidelines, and when there is a valid extenuating circumstance, there should be an exception. And I pointed out that the competitor may have my size in one of their stores, but I wasn’t going to spend the time researching this. To her credit, this manager volunteered to do the legwork here—or maybe it was footwork. She came up dry—the competitor didn’t have the ability to see national inventory, so the OM called several stores, none of which had my size. Cinderella still won’t get to the ball. I think that it would be safe to assume that  across the country, with a large competitor, there would probably be at least one pair in my size somewhere. But the OM stood firm—pleasant but firm. Perhaps she should have sent Prince Charming out to find the glass slipper in my size. But she didn’t.

Did I stop there? Of course not. I called the Executive office and reached Mr. Nordstrom’s secretary. She was truly dismayed when I told her that I was having a customer service problem. She had one of her staff research. He called me back—same answer. I decided to let Mr. Nordstrom’s secretary know that although I am often pleased with Nordstrom, they just lost  their position in my “go to” lineup. When I called, Blake Nordstrom answered the phone. When I told him that I wanted to let his secretary know the outcome on a customer service problem, he, too, sounded dismayed. But when I gave him the quick overview, he politely extricated himself. I guess that Blake Nordstrom wasn’t my Prince Charming that day.

Final resolution would have been to take the printed page with the competitor pricing to the store and have the price adjusted. I’m pretty sure that they would have done that. But we’ll never know, since I didn’t like the shoes and returned them.

Nordstrom has since redeemed themselves, adjusting a skirt price from full price to sale price a couple of weeks after I bought the skirt. But I really can’t understand how they could be so incredibly rigid on the shoe price match. Uh huh—treat everyone else fairly, but send Cinderella home, running for the carriage in her bare feet, only to find a pumpkin waiting for her.