After The Tenth..... When The Fun Really Begins

I'm going to break from our normal happy go-lucky tone for just a moment here because I'm now on a personal mission against Toy R Us and Babies R Us due to their very frustrating return policy.

Imagine this scenario: You have friends that decide to get you baby gifts. It turns out that two of your friends have the same taste and you wind up with a duplicate item or outfit. No problem right? Just exchange one of them for another item that you haven't received. If they shopped at Babies R Us, then the answer is NO, it is a problem.

It seems that their official policy is to "reserve the right to decline returns without a receipt", which actually means they will never let you return your items, even if you are a pregnant woman in her 9th month and you have asked very politely at multiple store locations. Not only won't they let you return the items, but you cannot exchange them either. We aren't registered at either of these stores, but we confirmed that even if we were, they still wouldn't take back the items without a receipt. This policy is probably fiscally smart, but is definitely not customer service smart.

What was really helpful though, was that Babies R Us store manager provided two alternative suggestions to him allowing the product exchange:

1) We should call the people who bought us the item and ask them to give us their sales reciept so we could return their gift. Wouldn't that be a CLASSY move?

2) We should take the product back to a specific competitor of theirs, because they aren't a national chain and "they take anything back." He came up with this brilliant strategy even after Annie informed him that we researched the product and his store was the only one to sell this brand....no luck.

So now I'm using my little forum to kick off my "Babies R Us Ain't For Us" campaign. I'm asking all of you to avoid registering or even shopping at Babies R Us/Toy R US as they are very difficult to deal with.

The silver lining in this whole experience is that we have a gift card or two from these stores and when we go and buy diapers with them, we won't have to worry about duplicates being an issue. I've heard a rumor that you can never had too many diapers.