Buy $50 worth of items in the same category and you get a physical $15 gift card. In all, what should it be and what was offered?
Situation A - you buy 3 items at $25 each. Realize one was the wrong color and return it. What is the amount of refund?
Situation B - you buy 5 items @ $10 each. Walking away you realize the cashier scanned one twice and charged you for six. You immediately go to Guest Services. What is the amount of the refund?
Situation C - you buy 5 @ $10 each and return one. What is the refund?
Not sure I fully understand, but I’ll take a stab.
A: Refund of $25
B: Refund of $10
C: Refund of $10 after surrendering the $15 gift card. If gift card has been used or whatnot, then no return accepted. Or it would cost you $5 to return it.
I think the question was that for each of them, what should the refund be AND what refund the the Loc retailer offer. You addressed only what should the refund be, and I agree with all your answers.
Since he asked the question, I suspect the Loc retailer wanted to cancel one gift card in each of A and B. Not what it should be, but perhaps what was offered. In C, the cost you $5 answer is not completely off the wall, but once you find that is the answer you should be able to decide to keep the item. (And, not asked, also return whatever you got for the gift certificate and get $10 back is another right answer.)
Oh, okay, that makes sense. I also assumed that the retailer tried to take the $15 gift card in all scenarios…or in none of them, creating arbitrage in the third scenario.
What it probably will be: price of each item was adjusted to $20, so they will give you a $20 refund.
What you should do: Don’t even try for $25. Try for an exchange since you still want the item.
D@#& well better be $10, but they will probably have to redo the entire transaction to get you more than $7.50 because the computer almost certainly adjusted the price of each item to be $7.50. So they’ll have to refund the whole $60 and then re-ring up for $50.
It’s going to be $7.00. So if you actually only want $40 worth, this is worth doing because you’ll essentially end up paying $3 for a $15 gift card.
I do not care.
But make sure the gift card is a real gift card, not a promotional item with an expiration date (and sometimes a “not good until” date).
In this case I think Target’s preferred MO is to issue you the $20 refund and then you go pick out the item that you actually want and bring it plus your receipt to Guest Services and they will honor the $20 price on the correctly colored item.
I’ve dealt with this precise situation at Target on multiple occasions. It essentially boils down to an exchange but is technically slightly different.
If it’s Target they’re real gift cards. They run these promotions constantly. Spend $50 on household cleaning products, get a $15 gift card. It’s a real gift card. You can put it on your Target account or they’ll give you a physical one. It’s good immediately… just can’t be on the same transaction where you were awarded the card. But it can be immediately after if it’s in store. Online where they bring it out to your car or you pick it up from Guest Services then it might take half an hour to show up in your online account but it’s good as soon as it does and they don’t expire.
A. should be $25 refund IMO. They would tell you $20 bc their math assigns the $15 gift card prorata to each item ($5 each in this case). IDNGAF about their system math, I still satisfied the requirements of the promotion and “the system” should be able to correctly re-do the two items kept to assign them $7.50 behind the curtain.
B. Should be $10. Target told me $7.50, bc the system assigned $2.50 to each of the “six” items. Except one was not real. I told the person I was not leaving and was given just cash from the register bc they had no other way to handle it. Said differently, if Target associate makes a mistake on one of these you get to pay them extra for having made the mistake.
C. Target would give you back $7 but I could see them telling you you are SOL bc of the gift card (physical card). Had they credited your Circle rewards account the $15 instead of a physical card then they could correct it on the back end now that you failed to live up to the requirement for the reward.
The real event was B and I was less than impressed. A also leaves me unimpressed. They do it all (per the store associate at guest services) to combat C (sincere or bad actors exploiting it).
They should have redone the whole transaction. That’s how they can handle it.
I agree with you that the computer should be smart enough to handle A and B with $25 and $10 refunds respectively, but I know from experience that’s not what it will actually do.
I’ve made them redo the whole transaction on several occasions.