The Suck: I was in Hertfordshire visiting a friend when I noticed some really nice-looking suitcases in the window of a store called B&M. The store was closed when I saw them, so I decided to go back the next day and have a look. The suitcases in question were red ultra-lightweight ones and I really liked them.
Now, all the suitcases were on the very top shelf in the store with a strapline telling you to ask for assistance to get them down. There were two different sizes of suitcase on the shelf (a larger one and a smaller one), and two different price tickets (something over £30 and a ticket for £24.99). The tickets did list the size of the suitcases, but in inches: on the suitcase, it was in centimetres and I'm not so hot on converting numbers in my head.
Does it seem reasonable to think that the larger suitcase costs £30-whatever and the smaller suitcase costs £24.99? They were the only suitcases there and the only tickets there. There were no spaces on the shelves. No indication that those prices did not match those items.
Except that they didn't. When I got to the checkout, I noticed that there was a tag on the item that said it was £29.99, but I wasn't too worried because I thought that maybe the price had gone up and the ticket hadn't been changed over on the she;f. When it was scanned, it rang up as £29.99 and I queried it. They told me that the £24.99 was for the smaller suitcase.
This confused me. There were only two sizes and this was the smaller of the two.
Now, this could have been because I'm autistic, but if there are only two sizes on the shelf and I'm being told repeatedly that "The smaller one is £24.99", I don't automatically intuit that there are actually three different sizes of suitcase. I didn't want to spend quite that much on the suitcase, so I decided to leave it and go back to the shelf to have another look.
At the shelf, I met the employee who'd been sent to check the price and tried to explain to her how it was confusing because there was no ticket indicating that anything on the shelf was £29.99. She told me that other customers knock the tickets down (which is understandable) and that they can't go through the store every day to check all the tickets are right.
Yes, that's correct: apparently, it's not in the job description of somebody working at a store to make sure that all the price tickets are displayed correctly.
So I gave up, left, went to Wilkinsons and got a suitcase of the same size as the B&M £29.99 one for £25 instead.
tl;dr: Two sizes of suitcase and two price tickets apparently means that there are three sizes of suitcase and three prices, and if customers knock down tickets, it's not the job of the employees to check the tickets are right and put new ones up.
P.S. I know this isn't a huge, terrible bad service, but it was still misleading and I got pretty upset about the whole thing because I have anxiety issues.
Edit: Having received a couple of comments about this, I agree that expecting somebody to check all the price tags every day is somewhat unreasonable. I still feel that they way they responded to the incorrect price tag was unfair.
I have also found out that the suitcases come in four sizes (19-inch (£24.99), 23-inch (£29.99), 26-inch (£34.99) and 30-inch (£39.99)) but they only had price tags out for the 19-inch and either the 26- or 30-inch, I can't remember which. I picked up the 23-inch case thinking it was the 19-inch case.