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See 8 but buy 6. See 6 but you can buy 8.

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-04-10 09:47:02 - Graham Ellis

We're looking for a new dining table and chairs for customer lunches and yesterday we visited the department store that's just to the north of the town.

Can you believe they have a sale on (they seem to have a sale on more often that not!) and there, on display, was just a table that looked just the part. It could seat 4, 6, or 8 and there were 8 chairs around it. Ideal. Not cheap, but sensible pricetag. We approached an assistant and exlained that we wanted to spend our money on the table and the eight chairs as it was displayed. "Oh - that only comes with six chairs ... I don't think you can order extras but you CAN order extras for ...". And she points us to another design, on display with 6 chairs, that didn't meet our needs. It seems that only the store manager can vary the sales policy and he's not in (being the weekend); the sale finishes today - Sunday - afternoon and me thinks that our local store has lost the business.

Sad - we really prefer to support local businesses but there are some that make it very hard for us to do so. But perhaps they prefer to sell a lot of standard product and don't really want business like ours - perhaps we're too much trouble.

Am I the only one who gets frustrated by stores that work like this?