Continuing our ongoing community discussion into customer service, today I will be focusing on Anthropologie’s return policy. I’ll share my thoughts and then please let us know what you think in the comments!
Tomorrow we’ll talk customer tracking.
To begin, what exactly is Anthropologie’s return policy? According to their website:
All Anthropologie merchandise is unconditionally guaranteed. If you are not satisfied with your purchase for any reason, please let us know so we can take care of you.
Easy enough, right? Simple, straightforward and not much room for interpretation. And yet week after week debates rage on in the comments about returns, price adjustments and exchanges. Turns out it’s not that simple after all.
ANTHROPOLOGIE HAS ONE OF THE MOST GENEROUS RETURN POLICIES OUT THERE…
The strategy behind Anthropologie’s return policy is very smart. An unconditional guarantee on products gives consumers confidence. Why should I be afraid to purchase an item when I know that Anthropologie will take it back at any time for whatever reason if I’m not happy?
The item stretched after one wearing? Anthropologie takes it back. The item shrank in the wash? Anthropologie takes is back. The heel scuffed, the zip broke, the material itched, I found a rip or hole, I just changed my mind? Anthropologie takes it back.
I’ve never had any issues making a return at an Anthropologie store. I don’t return often. But I’ve returned online orders, store purchases, sale buys all without issue. Late last fall I made my biggest return ever to Anthropologie, nearly $900 worth of items that had been sitting in my closet unworn. The SA who did my return skillfully sifted through all my receipts and tags patiently. She worked with me for nearly 45 minutes at the Rockefeller Center Anthropologie which is one of the brand’s busiest stores. There was no guilt, shame or annoyance. At the end I took home a stack of receipts and promised myself not to buy so much clothing I wasn’t going to wear. The return experience itself went smoothly.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the smooth experience I did. For such a simple return policy there seems to be a lot of inconsistency in application.
…BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO APPLY CONSISTENTLY
It’s important to remember that Anthropologie is first and foremost a business. They want you to buy, not return. They want you to buy at full price, not on sale or a promotion. And they want you be happy so that you’ll shop there again.
That last point is why they allow returns at all — better to have a happy customer who will come back and buy more than an angry customer who will never come back again. The way Anthropologie’s return policy is written it should be a no questions asked transaction. But no one here is naive enough to think that’s reality, are we?
Many community members have experienced situations where they’ve been asked to a SmartLabel return instead of returning in-store, or where they’ve been offered store credits in cases where a direct refund should have been given, or where there have been disputes over the amount of return money a customer is due. Why are these discrepancies popping up? Many reasons.
At the store level, the business fact is that any returns made at an Anthropologie store count against that store’s daily totals. Online returns hurt more because they count against a store even though the purchase wasn’t made there. This isn’t something the customer should be concerned about but you can be sure that the store’s employees and managers are thinking about it. A store that is doing well can hire more employees, extend hours and hold fun events. A store that is not doing well has to cut hours, make due with less personnel at any given time and has less of a discretionary budget for fun. But to decide that stores are making return policy decisions based on this is silly. Alienating customers does nothing to help a store’s bottom line, so an employee is going to be much more likely to give you a return than not.
This is not to say that store employees live to make customers miserable. Quite the opposite. Store employees usually go above and beyond to ensure we’re happy! They look up transactions that are months old because our online order forms have no totals or we forgot our receipts. They call customer service to verify we’re getting the most money back as possible. They err in our favor much more than they err on the store’s side. I think it’s very important to remember this! Sure some of us have had bad experiences but we tend to remember those bad times much more than we remember all the good experiences we’ve had. Most community members are frequent Anthro shoppers and I’m sure you’ve gotten good service much more than you’ve gotten stuck with a bad egg.
Stores have guidelines on how to apply the return policy, but it leaves a lot up to district or store management’s discretion. As a result a customer at one store may have a different experience making a return than a customer at another store. Store A might let you return a dimed out item while Store B might not. Store C might give you a refund of the current selling price of something you purchased but don’t have the receipt for while Store D might give you a full-price refund. The situation is even more blurry when it comes to price adjustments. Some stores allow price adjustments (PAs) all the time (so long as you’re in your 14 day window). Some don’t allow PAs on promotions. Some don’t want to give PAs on 2nd/3rd/etc cuts. Hearing that a customer got a PA that you could not can be annoying. But it’s not the store’s fault. And the employee you spoke with probably could not have helped even if they wanted to, due to either management policy at that store, the district level, or perhaps the corporate level.
…BUT CUSTOMERS TAKE ADVANTAGE, SO LIMITS HAVE TO BE CREATED
Anthropologie’s corporate return policy is longer and less lenient than the public version. It would be great if all customers were honest but we’re not. Most of us are. But not all. We try to return items we’ve worn many times over. We steal and then try to make money by returning those stolen goods for gift cards, which we then sell to an unsuspecting person. We fake receipts or order summaries. We realize we overspent and try to return items to correct our budgeting errors. We play a game where we only care about getting an item for the lowest price possible, so we buy an item/return it for a lower price ad infinitum. (This game is something different from people on a budget who wait for items to hit 2nd/3rd/etc cuts. There is a big difference between buying something at full price as a placeholder, returning it to rebuy at sale price, and returning it again to rebuy at a lower a cut, with the intention all along of owning it for the lowest price before wearing it.) And so on. Placing limits on return policies can help suppress these issues but they never go away.
So Anthropologie’s internal policies have to be cognizant of things like loss prevention, wardrobing and customers who play the ‘how low will it go’ game. The store needs to be wary of customers who will cost them money rather than making them money. Those are some of the corporate considerations.
The goal is to treat every customer like a king until a pattern emerges and they are exposed as a thief. The thing is, appearances can be deceiving.
…BUT DUE TO INCONSISTENCIES, PEOPLE CAN LOOK LIKE SERIAL RETURNERS WHEN THEY’RE NOT
I used to shop at Victoria’s Secret a lot. It was my go-to bra spot. As a 34D many times the store would carry the styles I wanted to try on but not my size. It meant that I placed a lot of orders from their website.
That was how a not-so-fun game began. I’d order three styles in a 34D. They’d arrive. One would fit and two would not, even though they were all the same cup size and sometimes even the same style. So two went back. To try to fix this, I started ordering both 34Ds and 34DDs. My next order might have 6 bras (two sizes in three styles) which meant at minimum three bras were getting returned. Then I started having an issue where sometimes a 34D was too big. So now I was ordering 34Cs, 34Ds and 34DDs all in the name of just finding a stupid bra that fit. I was just trying to get to 10 bras total!!
One day I’m at the store making my umpteenth return when the SA asked me for my ID. This had never happened before and my eyebrows immediately went into oh really mode. She told me that they would accept all my returns I had with me but that I could not make any more returns to the store for 90 days because I’d made something like 15 returns in the space of the last 60 days.
I was mad. Livid. They were basically accusing me of being a serial returner!! HOW DARE THEY. But here’s the thing: I was a serial returner. Not on purpose; by accident. There was no other way for me to get bras that fit from that store. So I made a decision with my wallet. I stopped buying from Victoria’s Secret altogether. That was about 5 years ago. Now I’ll make the very occasional buy there but I’ve found other stores that fit me better. (Gap is now my primary bra source, love their T-Shirt bras! And they carry D cups in-store.) I’ve never looked back. Perhaps it didn’t make business sense for VS to stock 34Ds in-store but they lost me as a customer because of it.
I feel for petites, or for my fellow talls, or for plus sizes which are hardly ever carried in Anthropologie stores. Because they have to order things online for one reason or another they are by their very nature more likely to make returns. No consumer tracking system I’ve seen really allows for this so as a result someone’s account may be flagged as a business risk when the reality is that it’s the store’s inconsistencies causing the higher return rate, not the customer. The optimal fix would be for Anthropologie to carry these marginalized sizes in-store. Absent of that, the strongest message you can send is with your wallet.
Those aren’t the only issues either. I’ve noticed a lot more items lately where if I try on two of the exact same item in my size they will fit differently. Anthro’s knits are especially prone to this recently. With the advent of some online orders being fulfilled by stores, people are receiving more damaged items, more mis-labeled items, more items that are worn and just not new. I think Anthropologie’s making a huge error with the way they’ve deployed this feature. I buy from the website because I want a new, crisp, unworn item. I’m paying at least $10 in shipping for the privilege! So you can bet I’m doubly angry if instead I receive a store item that is shopworn, damaged or wrong. I wish there was a way to select whether I’d accept a store item or not. It would save a lot of hassles.
Another issue that doesn’t get enough attention on EA is that many Anthropologie lovers live really far away from a store. I tend to forget this since I’m spoiled and have 6 NYC stores, plus 5 more within an hour’s drive. But if you live far away from a store and have to order everything online regardless of your size or tastes, it goes to figure that you’ll also be returning more.
Right now when you order from Anthropologie’s website you’re taking a risk. You may get the item you want. It may be the right size. It may be in new condition. It may fit consistently. But it might not. And then you have a decision — keep it and try and make it work, or return it. That’s just for us regular folks. Can you imagine being a special size? Where you have to order something in the hopes that it runs true to size but also fits your proportions?
Or you can put up with being potentially labeled a serial returner. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
WHY THE RETURN POLICY SHOULD STAY THE WAY IT IS
I have seen calls in the community for Anthropologie to change its return policy — to limit returns to a year or 6 months, to not allow returns of worn clothing, etc.
To all suggestions of limits I say: hell no! The return policy is a big part of the reason why I shop at Anthropologie. They already make me grumpy in having to pay shipping 90% of the time. To limit returns would make me very unhappy even though I rarely use the privilege.
Although community members have seen the downside of the current policy, we have to remember that we are a vocal minority. We’re some of the most frequent Anthropologie shoppers. So of course we’re going to see these things more often and be more aware of them.
From a business side, Anthropologie knows that the longer you have an item the more likely you are to keep it. So part of their lenient policy is the hope that customers will buy an item and dither so long on the return that they just to decide to keep the item or sell it through other means. It’s simple, it’s smart and I think it should stay that way. It’s also better for the customer because it puts less stress on the decision to return. Have something in your closet you haven’t worn, tags still attached, after a year? You can take it back, get whatever you paid refunded and buy something else. Or save that money. Or do whatever you want with it. How nice is that?
I don’t make returns often because once I’ve committed to purchasing an item, I’ve also committed myself to owning it. I realize that we all have different lifestyles, budget considerations, and shopping philosophies here. I don’t pretend to know better than anyone else here. One belief I do hold strongly to is that it’s wrong to return something you’ve worn that is undamaged simply to repurchase it at a lower price outside the PA window. Once you’ve worn something it’s yours. If nothing is wrong with it I do not think it’s appropriate to return it to the store.
ONE LAST NOTE: TREAT EACH OTHER LIKE HUMAN BEINGS
A couple of years ago I was in Philadelphia and had dropped into the city’s Anthropologie store. As I was waiting in line to check out, I overhead a confrontation between a manager and a customer.
The customer said it was her birthday month but she’d forgotten her birthday discount card. This was in the days when the birthday discount was a lottery and not everyone got it. It was also before the days of the online discount. It was store card only if you got lucky. The customer asked the manager if she could just get the discount. The manager offered to check the customer’s account via her anthro card to see if the discount had been sent. The customer didn’t have her card, didn’t remember the email it was under, couldn’t remember the phone number she’d signed up with.
The manager explained that she ideally needed to take the card from the customer for her transaction records anyway, so the customer had two options: she could put everything she wanted on hold and then come back with the card to buy everything at a discount, or she could buy everything now and come back with the card and the store would happily adjust the transaction down 15%.
The customer refused either option saying it was now or bust. The manager held her ground, explaining that without the card present there was nothing she could do. At that point the customer began berating the manager, calling her names and telling the manager that she as a customer knew Anthropologie’s policies better than the manager did. The manager somehow kept a straight, calm face. Then she volunteered that perhaps they could begin by looking at the customer’s drivers license to see if that information had been recorded in the customer’s account. Of course her driver’s license would have her birthday but the manager didn’t mention that.
Beet-faced, the customer declared that the manager was being so rude and bolted from the store. Now, perhaps the manager could have bent and given the customer the discount. Or perhaps the customer was lying about it being her birthday month. We’ll never know the reality but here’s one thing I do know: when you’re rude to someone you never get what you want. I do not understand people who think that berating a service employee is that ticket to success. I know people who of the mistaken impression that service industry workers are uneducated and unintelligent when nothing could be further from the truth.
Everyone has a bad day. Lord knows there are days when I’ve walked into Anthropologie all, Behold! It is I, roxy, here with some returns to make to this lucky store! Bestow upon me store credit so that I may buy some more of your flowy goods. I am having a bad day so do not trifle with me. Do not bother me with logic or rules. Credit now or attitude later. That attitude doesn’t work so well when I’ve forgotten my receipts and we can’t find the transaction on my anthro card. Or really ever. There are also days when I’ve gotten a SA at a bad time, perhaps after they just dealt with an unruly customer or who knows what, where I get a little less of that friendliness that I’ve come to cherish. It can be unnerving but there’s no reason to respond in kind.
It is just clothing. And yes, Anthropologie has a duty to nail the clothing which they’re falling short of these days. But when a SA gives you an answer you don’t want you don’t get to throw it back into their faces. It’s not a personal insult. It’s a policy they’re following. They’re just doing their jobs! If they can go above and beyond for you they will but sometimes that’s not possible. Maybe the strictest manager is right behind them. Maybe they got in trouble for bending the rules once too often. Or maybe they just like following rules better than breaking them.
When a SA gives you an answer that’s not acceptable, just politely ask for a manager. And if you get no further with the manager let it go til another day. Karma is an amazing thing. Build up quantities of the good karma! I’ve gotten lucky more times than I can count. Stores have found items I wanted buried deep within avalanches of their backstock. I’ve gotten full-price credits when I forgot my receipt. I’ve had stores nice enough to hold items for me for longer than 24 hours. Local stores will ship my purchases to my apartment for me if I can’t carry it all or if I’m about to leave town. It’s easy to forget all the great things SAs do for us in the heat of an angry moment. Let’s not lose the bigger picture here.
What do you think of Anthropologie’s return policy? Is is just right, too harsh, or too lenient? Do most of your returns go smoothly? Have quality issues affected your return frequency? Is your size carried in-store or do you have to buy to try?
