8 ms·

I frequently shop at Home Depot. Last year I was remodeling my bathroom and I had some extra parts (unused) and I went to return them. I was mistakenly flagged

I frequently shop at Home Depot. Last year I was remodeling my bathroom and I had some extra parts (unused) and I went to return them. I was mistakenly flagged by Retail Equation and several of the things I was returning were denied. It was extremely frustrating as I had bought thousands of dollars of merchandise and was literally trying to return less than $40 of stuff. I asked to talk to the store manager, she said there was nothing she could do. To me, the real problem with these systems is that relying on them too much removes the ability for people to provide good customer service. Fortunately for me, I don't give up so easily. I guessed the email address of the CEO of Home Depot and wrote him. The next day the VP of Loss Prevention called me and then called the store. They let me return my merchandise the next time I tried. ;)

ng-user 9y ago
Was the email you guessed perhaps first.last@homedepot.ca?
- Edmond 9y ago
  you can mostly guess these emails because they all use predictable patterns. The trick I use is to just find any random persons email with a google search (ex "@homedepot.com") and use the same pattern for the person I am trying to reach at the given organization, it works most of the time.
- nathantotten 9y ago
  I honestly don’t think many executives are trying to hide their emails that hard. Steve Jobs always got a lot of press when he would reply to customers, but the reality is that executives actually value this communication. It helps them learn of problems they may otherwise be insulated from. Of course executives generally also don’t make their email too readily available because then everyone would contact them and that wouldn’t scale. I have emailed various executives over the years and don’t recall it ever not working. It even worked with Comcast to my surprise - the next day someone from some department like “executive customer service” contacted me.
  - baxtr 9y ago
    Be aware that these guys rarely read their email themselves. They have a dedicated team that handles all these requests, usually on their own. (I’m not an executive, but I have good insights)
    - adrianratnapala 9y ago
      Fine, but that's even better. It means they are doing something like using the execs inbox as a black-box monitoring stream to find out about problems that internal info gathering will miss. And better still, actually paying people to triage the alerts!
    - nathantotten 9y ago
      Yeah, this of course happens at the CEO levels, but I don't think it undermines the principle. If those people reading the emails are empowered to actually fix problems and if they are reporting back experiences to the CEO or relevant executives the information still makes it into the org. In my experience, based on the email thread I think the CEO of Home Depot actually did read it. I left out a step in my story. What actually happened is the VP of Loss Prevention emailed me asking for my number so he could call me. I gave it and he called me. He actually replied to me via the original email. From the thread I could tell that the CEO forwarded it to the VP of Home Depot North America with something like "Jane, can you look into this?" then that person forwarded it to the VP with a more specific request. Based on my internal experiences at big companies this is pretty common.
  - robk 9y ago
    Jeff bezos sends all his mail to a low grade support team in India who have terrible canned responses
    - ericd 9y ago
      Hilarious if true, given that Amazon frontline support is generally excellent.
    - leesalminen 9y ago
- Scoundreller 9y ago
  Heh, I did the same kind of thing with a government agency. Well, more like 50 addresses. I got a few replies. Now I'm filing an Access to Information request to see what happened with all of the emails.
- rootusrootus 9y ago
  That should work for almost any reputable company. They know that pissed off customers are loud, and they know those customers will probably try to email the CEO. So make it easy, and let the executive response team turn a loud angry customer into a happy, content customer. I don't abuse it, but let me tell you, when I emailed Mary Barra @ GM a few months ago because the regular customer service was having no luck finding the car I had already ordered and paid for, even though OnStar showed it 20 miles away -- a gal from the executive response team called me a couple hours later and she already located the car, had someone on-site do a physical verification, and arranged for a truck to go pick it up and take it to the dealer so I could take delivery. Then she called several more times over the next couple days to make sure everything from that moment forward was going smoothly. She turned me from a rapidly-getting-more-angry customer to a much more relaxed, happy customer with a bit of renewed faith that GM isn't totally a lost cause ;-).
piracykills 9y ago
Yikes, that's pretty horrific. I think I'll be paying with cash at these places from now on.
- castis 9y ago
  What is it you would hope to accomplish with that?
  - brokensegue 9y ago
    by paying cash he avoids getting a credit card discount and other purchase protections but at least he gives the store a discount on processing fees.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Nothing to tie it to "you" so it's not your card that's used in conjunction with other items in the bad-item-returner flagging algorithm. Many stores ask for ID to return items in different circumstances (e.g. cash purchase, wanting cash back or not accepting store credit, etc).
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      They don't need to tie the purchases to you. Only the returns. Even in cases where you are banned from a store for excessive returns, you are still perfectly allowed to keep shopping there. You just can't return anything. So when you return items, they will ask for your id, even if you paid cash originally.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
      That doesn't actually solve the issue many times. Some stores simply require an ID for any and all refunds. The reason for this is fraud, actually: I worked at a retail pharmacy in the US, and we had a group of people that would look through the trash to find cash receipts. They would proceed to another store to steal the merchandise, and then to a third store to refund the item. Nearly all stores require ID if you do not have a receipt and enter it in their system. It might not be your card, but it'll be tied to your name and ID.
bluGill 9y ago
Home depot has a real problem (I assume all retail does - my sister works Home Depot returns so I hear stories) with people who go into the store grab something, leave, then come back (perhaps to a different store) and return it "I don't need it". It is often obvious to the clerk this is what just happened, but how do you prove it?
- draw_down 9y ago
  What's wrong with that?
  - selfsimilar 9y ago
    I assume by 'grab' they mean shoplift or less politely, steal. There's also the trick of rooting through the store garbage for receipts, then going through the store to find the corresponding items and 'returning' things you never bought with the found receipt.
    - songshu 9y ago
      A friend of mine found some shoes she liked in the right size at the wrong price in one store, and in the wrong size at the right price in another. She bought both and "returned" the wrong sized ones to the higher priced store.
      - jschwartzi 9y ago
        Return policy arbitrage. Cool!
    - Haydos585x2 9y ago
      This really seems like a solved problem in Australia. Once you leave the store with your purchase your reciept is stamped. If a stamped reciept is coming out of the store it's a simple check of the date and time, which can be verified by a checout-person. Ezpz. The biggest issue for theft that I saw was putting other items inside the box of a larger item. Say you buy a lawn mower, walk the box around the store, put some other items inside that box, pay for the lawn mower. Returns are mandated here though and I guess the US is anti-consumer in a lot of ways so companies won't really be forced to find solutions that don't explicitly benefit them.
solomatov 9y ago
>I asked to talk to the store manager, she said there was nothing she could do. To me, the real problem with these systems is that relying on them too much removes the ability for people to provide good customer service. Funny thing, GDPR which is looked down here, has provisions concerning this problem: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ You can appeal automated decision making and companies have to provide you with such an option.
- mgleason_3 9y ago
  It's moronic. These retailers know whether you recently purchased the item you're returning. Why are they counting it against you?
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    Agreed, this seems to turn a simple database lookup into a ml classification problem.. presumably this only happens for people who don’t provide a phone number or name?
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Because recent buyers are among the prime suspects for abuse, since some people will exploit retailers' lenient return policies as a free rental service. They'll buy something expensive, use it a handful of times during the conventional 30-day return window, and then return the used, depreciated item to the store for a full refund. This item then has to be liquidated or refurbished, but even if it didn't, you've still probably lost the margin you made on it just by handling the return. Margins per unit are in typically in the realm of a few bucks, at best. Pennies count in retail. You can get away with this a few times, but more than that, and a backend system like this will flag you as a "serial returner" and instruct the staff to refuse your return. It'd be great if they could make it easy to allow managerial override, but unfortunately, many managers or other store employees work in cahoots with civilian accomplices to rip off the retailers with this type of scheme.
    - bkohlmann 9y ago
lph 9y ago
The same thing happened to me: doing a remodel, spent thousands of dollars at Home Depot, returned a small fraction of it, banned. The ban seems to have expired, but for three years I had to get my wife to go return things for me.
FireBeyond 9y ago
And all this for what? "In some rare cases, less than one tenth of one percent of returns, we catch something fraudulent". "Despite 99.9%+ of this activity being perfectly reasonable, we see fit to limit it because it might help us catch <0.1%"
tyingq 9y ago
It's unfortunate, but I have seen the other side of the coin. Waiting in line behind people in the return line that have obviously bought stuff at yard sales or similar, and trying to return it for cash. No idea why they don't weight "proof of purchase" higher in their algorithm though.
- Cd00d 9y ago
  What about gift returns?
matt_the_bass 9y ago
I’ve found that this is a non-issue as long as you still have the receipt and/or credit card used for purchase. This seems like a legit response for returns without a receipt.

ng-user 9y ago

Was the email you guessed perhaps first.last@homedepot.ca?

Edmond 9y ago
you can mostly guess these emails because they all use predictable patterns. The trick I use is to just find any random persons email with a google search (ex "@homedepot.com") and use the same pattern for the person I am trying to reach at the given organization, it works most of the time.
nathantotten 9y ago
I honestly don’t think many executives are trying to hide their emails that hard. Steve Jobs always got a lot of press when he would reply to customers, but the reality is that executives actually value this communication. It helps them learn of problems they may otherwise be insulated from. Of course executives generally also don’t make their email too readily available because then everyone would contact them and that wouldn’t scale. I have emailed various executives over the years and don’t recall it ever not working. It even worked with Comcast to my surprise - the next day someone from some department like “executive customer service” contacted me.
- baxtr 9y ago
  Be aware that these guys rarely read their email themselves. They have a dedicated team that handles all these requests, usually on their own. (I’m not an executive, but I have good insights)
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    Fine, but that's even better. It means they are doing something like using the execs inbox as a black-box monitoring stream to find out about problems that internal info gathering will miss. And better still, actually paying people to triage the alerts!
  - nathantotten 9y ago
    Yeah, this of course happens at the CEO levels, but I don't think it undermines the principle. If those people reading the emails are empowered to actually fix problems and if they are reporting back experiences to the CEO or relevant executives the information still makes it into the org. In my experience, based on the email thread I think the CEO of Home Depot actually did read it. I left out a step in my story. What actually happened is the VP of Loss Prevention emailed me asking for my number so he could call me. I gave it and he called me. He actually replied to me via the original email. From the thread I could tell that the CEO forwarded it to the VP of Home Depot North America with something like "Jane, can you look into this?" then that person forwarded it to the VP with a more specific request. Based on my internal experiences at big companies this is pretty common.
- robk 9y ago
  Jeff bezos sends all his mail to a low grade support team in India who have terrible canned responses
  - ericd 9y ago
    Hilarious if true, given that Amazon frontline support is generally excellent.
  - leesalminen 9y ago
Scoundreller 9y ago
Heh, I did the same kind of thing with a government agency. Well, more like 50 addresses. I got a few replies. Now I'm filing an Access to Information request to see what happened with all of the emails.
rootusrootus 9y ago
That should work for almost any reputable company. They know that pissed off customers are loud, and they know those customers will probably try to email the CEO. So make it easy, and let the executive response team turn a loud angry customer into a happy, content customer. I don't abuse it, but let me tell you, when I emailed Mary Barra @ GM a few months ago because the regular customer service was having no luck finding the car I had already ordered and paid for, even though OnStar showed it 20 miles away -- a gal from the executive response team called me a couple hours later and she already located the car, had someone on-site do a physical verification, and arranged for a truck to go pick it up and take it to the dealer so I could take delivery. Then she called several more times over the next couple days to make sure everything from that moment forward was going smoothly. She turned me from a rapidly-getting-more-angry customer to a much more relaxed, happy customer with a bit of renewed faith that GM isn't totally a lost cause ;-).

piracykills 9y ago

Yikes, that's pretty horrific. I think I'll be paying with cash at these places from now on.

castis 9y ago
What is it you would hope to accomplish with that?
- brokensegue 9y ago
  by paying cash he avoids getting a credit card discount and other purchase protections but at least he gives the store a discount on processing fees.
- kodablah 9y ago
  Nothing to tie it to "you" so it's not your card that's used in conjunction with other items in the bad-item-returner flagging algorithm. Many stores ask for ID to return items in different circumstances (e.g. cash purchase, wanting cash back or not accepting store credit, etc).
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    They don't need to tie the purchases to you. Only the returns. Even in cases where you are banned from a store for excessive returns, you are still perfectly allowed to keep shopping there. You just can't return anything. So when you return items, they will ask for your id, even if you paid cash originally.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
    That doesn't actually solve the issue many times. Some stores simply require an ID for any and all refunds. The reason for this is fraud, actually: I worked at a retail pharmacy in the US, and we had a group of people that would look through the trash to find cash receipts. They would proceed to another store to steal the merchandise, and then to a third store to refund the item. Nearly all stores require ID if you do not have a receipt and enter it in their system. It might not be your card, but it'll be tied to your name and ID.

bluGill 9y ago

Home depot has a real problem (I assume all retail does - my sister works Home Depot returns so I hear stories) with people who go into the store grab something, leave, then come back (perhaps to a different store) and return it "I don't need it". It is often obvious to the clerk this is what just happened, but how do you prove it?

draw_down 9y ago
What's wrong with that?
- selfsimilar 9y ago
  I assume by 'grab' they mean shoplift or less politely, steal. There's also the trick of rooting through the store garbage for receipts, then going through the store to find the corresponding items and 'returning' things you never bought with the found receipt.
  - songshu 9y ago
    A friend of mine found some shoes she liked in the right size at the wrong price in one store, and in the wrong size at the right price in another. She bought both and "returned" the wrong sized ones to the higher priced store.
    - jschwartzi 9y ago
      Return policy arbitrage. Cool!
  - Haydos585x2 9y ago
    This really seems like a solved problem in Australia. Once you leave the store with your purchase your reciept is stamped. If a stamped reciept is coming out of the store it's a simple check of the date and time, which can be verified by a checout-person. Ezpz. The biggest issue for theft that I saw was putting other items inside the box of a larger item. Say you buy a lawn mower, walk the box around the store, put some other items inside that box, pay for the lawn mower. Returns are mandated here though and I guess the US is anti-consumer in a lot of ways so companies won't really be forced to find solutions that don't explicitly benefit them.

solomatov 9y ago

>I asked to talk to the store manager, she said there was nothing she could do. To me, the real problem with these systems is that relying on them too much removes the ability for people to provide good customer service. Funny thing, GDPR which is looked down here, has provisions concerning this problem: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ You can appeal automated decision making and companies have to provide you with such an option.

mgleason_3 9y ago
It's moronic. These retailers know whether you recently purchased the item you're returning. Why are they counting it against you?
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Agreed, this seems to turn a simple database lookup into a ml classification problem.. presumably this only happens for people who don’t provide a phone number or name?
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Because recent buyers are among the prime suspects for abuse, since some people will exploit retailers' lenient return policies as a free rental service. They'll buy something expensive, use it a handful of times during the conventional 30-day return window, and then return the used, depreciated item to the store for a full refund. This item then has to be liquidated or refurbished, but even if it didn't, you've still probably lost the margin you made on it just by handling the return. Margins per unit are in typically in the realm of a few bucks, at best. Pennies count in retail. You can get away with this a few times, but more than that, and a backend system like this will flag you as a "serial returner" and instruct the staff to refuse your return. It'd be great if they could make it easy to allow managerial override, but unfortunately, many managers or other store employees work in cahoots with civilian accomplices to rip off the retailers with this type of scheme.
  - bkohlmann 9y ago

lph 9y ago

The same thing happened to me: doing a remodel, spent thousands of dollars at Home Depot, returned a small fraction of it, banned. The ban seems to have expired, but for three years I had to get my wife to go return things for me.

FireBeyond 9y ago

And all this for what? "In some rare cases, less than one tenth of one percent of returns, we catch something fraudulent". "Despite 99.9%+ of this activity being perfectly reasonable, we see fit to limit it because it might help us catch <0.1%"

tyingq 9y ago

It's unfortunate, but I have seen the other side of the coin. Waiting in line behind people in the return line that have obviously bought stuff at yard sales or similar, and trying to return it for cash. No idea why they don't weight "proof of purchase" higher in their algorithm though.

Cd00d 9y ago
What about gift returns?

matt_the_bass 9y ago

I’ve found that this is a non-issue as long as you still have the receipt and/or credit card used for purchase. This seems like a legit response for returns without a receipt.