Sears is expanding the number of in-person services that they offer to customers who are horrified at the prospect of walking into a Sears. Now you can perform in-person returns and exchanges at your local store, but without getting out of your car. What kind of wizardry is this? It’s the department store chain’s new bid to win over customers with ease and convenience.
How does it work? Sears produced this handy little animation, which explains how the service works, but also shows the customer inexplicably abandoning his dog in the Sears parking lot. Most of this animation is identical to oone that the department store released earlier this year for their curbside pickup service, right down to the ending where the dog runs after the car as it pulls away from Sears.
Things might go a little differently than planned if employees use the same methods to game this service that they were spotted using for the chain’s in-store pickup service. Customers were also promised service within 5 minutes for that, which employees quickly solved by just stopping the clock before it reached 5 minutes. Simple enough.
This is a benefit for Shop Your Way Rewards members, an elite privilege that you can only earn by giving your e-mail address to a Sears or Kmart cashier. It requires you to request a return or exchange ahead of time using the company’s website, then showing up in the designated parking spot at the Sears store and signaling an employee with a smartphone app that you’re ready to swap your merchandise. Thanks to the online request that you already made, the item you’re exchanging for will already be ready to go at the store’s pick-up window. In theory.
The retail-biz site Racked has some misgivings about this plan, mainly on behalf of the workers whose behinds will be on the line if customers are forced to wait longer than five minutes to finish their transactions.
Sears’s Drive Thru Service Has Employees Literally Running (via Business Insider)
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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