Target is so not Mom-friendly

So I guess I didn't scare you off, huh? Good! Welcome back!

I guess Target figures that since they want to focus on emo teenagers and trendy-but-broke college students, they can afford to lose a few Mom customers. Really? Think about how much money Moms spend at Target compared to how much those teens and students do.

I’ve been completely fed up with Target after trying to get an issue resolved for 4 months and being given nothing but automated responses with no reply address so I kept having to go back to their website and start all over again explaining the problem. I even had a customer service rep hang up on me. Apparently she had some issues with the English language and decided it was too much for her to handle.

It started back in August when I won a Fancy Nancy Doll for Princess on a blog giveaway. At around that same time, I’d earned a $20 gift card so, since her birthday was coming up, I used the gift card to buy the little toy dog that goes with the Fancy Nancy doll.

Two months or so went by and I still hadn’t received the doll and the blogger who hosted the contest said they were out of stock. Then I started getting emails from Target telling me that the dog was delayed and wouldn’t arrive until November. Then I got two more “shipment delayed” notices.

I had been to a local Target store several times and had seen plenty of the dolls and the dog. So I contacted Target and said “Look, just replace my gift card code with a physical gift card and I’ll go get the toy myself.” (We finally got the Fancy Nancy doll a few weeks ago but that was sent from some PR company and not Target.)

The response I got from Target was that shipment had been delayed, supplier was out, etc. and I could cancel my order if I wanted and that they wouldn’t charge me shipping if I chose to keep the order in place. Totally didn’t answer my question. I then got a notice that I needed to update my payment information because the card I’d given was invalid. See, the dog came to like $21 and some change after tax so I used one of those Visa gift cards to pay the balance and apparently the card had expired or maybe I’d used it all up or something. Anyway, I didn’t want the order completed so I just waited it out figuring they would cancel the order and refund me which was what I wanted in the first place.

Sure enough, they canceled it. So after I got that notice, I contacted online customer service and asked about my refund. You won’t believe what they told me. “You are not entitled to a refund because the card information you provided was invalid and no payment was made so there is nothing to be refunded.”

Oh I don’t think so. I want my $20 gift card refunded to me. Just because I didn’t let you charge the piddly little $1.62 to my card doesn’t mean I don’t get my gift card back.

I got sick of having to start over every time and go back to the customer service site and send a new email so I called them. I hate calling customer service – ANY customer service – because so many of them are outsourced to other countries and I don’t like talking to people that I can’t understand. But obviously email was getting me nowhere.

Sure enough, I got some girl that spoke heavily-accented English and I had to have her repeat almost everything she said. I did manage to decipher it enough to realize that she was telling me that I had not used a gift card to pay for the order. I told her to look again because I did. While she had me on hold, I went looking through my records to find the code for the gift card. She came back on the phone and tried to tell me again that the gift code had not been applied.

I pointed out to her that the website clearly says on it that it is just soooo easy to use these gift cards, just plug in the number blah blah blah and that that’s exactly what I did. Then I told her I still have the damn code and when I looked it up online it said that this gift card had already been used and had a zero balance. She asked for the code and after I gave it to her, she said it still had a $20 balance.

ARRGGHH!! Ok, fine, now that we’ve confirmed that there is a $20 balance on the card, SEND ME A PHYSICAL CARD and I will drive to the local Target store and pick the dog up myself. That’s when she mumbled something about getting more information then I heard elevator music and then nothing.

Its been a week since I sent them yet another email complaining about not receiving either the toy OR a refund and being told by the website that my gift card has a zero balance but being told by the agent that it has a $20 balance.

No response. This is bullshit. And apparently I’m not the only one because I just read this blog post from another Mom who got screwed out of a Britax car seat when Target messed up and claimed it was a pricing error and wouldn’t be honored.

Seriously, Target, somebody needs to WAKE UP over there. Have you heard of Wal-Mart’s “11 Moms” program? Wal-Mart is on fire when it comes to the world of Mommy blogging and social media. Between their latest campaigns and your poor customer service, Target, you’re going to find yourself losing a LOT of money to Wal-Mart. And trying to copy them doesn’t change my mind. (I don’t even like Dooce and I haven’t even heard of most of the others.) Hell, even K-Mart is catching on and launching a massive blogging campaign through Social Spark and some high-profile bloggers. The difference between the Wal-Mart or KMart bloggers and these Target moms is that the former are genuine people who interact with their loyal readers which goes a lot farther when it comes to social media.)

When you have to start laying people off and shutting down stores next year, don’t say you weren’t warned. Apparently you’ve already annoyed some Moms as it is.

Now give me my $20 back. I don’t even want a Target gift card anymore, I want a Visa gift card so I can spend it somewhere else.

Your ad here, right now: $0

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.