Customer Service Letdown

I'm sure by now many of you are weary of me talking about Lands' End and its Canvas sub-brand, but this is more of a customer service story.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered the red chambray shirt I had previously mentioned. Not being sure about the sizing, I ordered a large, since that's what I wear in the regular line. When it arrived it was just a bit too tight, threatening to button-gap if I so much as breathed in too deeply. So fine, Canvas is sized more or less like J. Crew; now I know.

If your local Sears has a LE department, you can do returns and exchanges there easily, so on Friday evening we went to the mall to do just that. On Friday I had received an email offering 25% off purchases online or in store, so I printed it and took it with me.

I returned the shirt and purchased the extra large using the discount. No one had any issue with that, but the clerks claimed that I couldn't use it on Canvas items. I pointed out that nowhere in the email did it say that Canvas was excluded. The woman who seemed to be in charge fixed me with what I'm sure she thought and hoped was a stern look and said, "We'll honor it this time, but in the future you can't do it." And they weren't even trying to be nice about it; the whole thing was handled rather rudely, in my opinion.

Now frankly, this is bullshit, but I wasn't interested in engaging her in a debate about what merchandise was subject to discount and what wasn't. For both Sears and Lands' End, listen up: you can't have it both ways. You want to make it more convenient to shop for Lands' End merchandise by putting it in the stores? That's great. You want to stimulate sales by offering coupons--also great. But you can't send me an email that says "good online or in stores" then have a clerk tell me I can't use it in the store. If you want to impose restrictions, you have to spell them out on the coupon itself.

If I really wanted to be a jerk about it, I could deliberately try to use such a coupon again for the specific purpose of being declined, and then I could contact the state's department of consumer affairs and/or the attorney general's office. But let's face it, I don't feel like investing that kind of time. So in the future I will probably just avoid going to a store where the clerks don't seem to know what they are talking about, and confine my purchases to the web site.

I'm rather disappointed by this whole incident, because normally dealing with Lands' End is nothing but pleasant. I've bought plenty from them over the past three decades, and I have rarely been less than satisfied with how I was treated as a customer, until now. I think there's a disconnect between the LE promotions department and the clerks working on the floor in the Sears stores--you are all part of the same company, after all--and until I see evidence to the contrary, I'll be avoiding making purchases in the stores.