Originally Posted By: AndyinAL
I am with the original poster. I don't like it when store employees give the store away. They are by definition stealing. It is not their money / product to give away.
You could make the situation right by just placing the same order again. Go into the store, complete the transaction and when you are finished, explain what had happened and put the batteries back on the shelf. That will correct their inventory and allow you to pay for your purchase. You could also get your core money back at the same time.
From the sounds of things, it wasn't just store employees giving him the okay, it was corporate doing it over the phone too. At that point, just take the freaking batteries. Employees at AAP are going to do exactly what corporate tells them.
I am a little surprised the manager didn't make the decision to just run OP's card then and there to make everything right without a call to corporate. They could have just treated it like a walk in sale. Once corporate is involved though, it is 100% about the customer leaving happy. They think happy to you will be free batteries. Their customer satisfaction protocols can't handle you wanting to pay for something because that isn't what most people want to do. Most people want things for free. What you were requesting simply did not compute.
It's going to vary from business to business. I work at a dealer now and might give things away because I am sometimes literally too busy to bill out some piddly [censored]. If the value of my time exceeds the value of the part, I'm giving it to you. I would not do that when I worked at AAP, but I would have done exactly what corporate told me to do, to a T, and AAP corporate is very concerned about customer satisfaction. Your idea of satisfaction didn't work with the standard formula.
