Yesterday i had an unfortunate experience, which has left me bewildered.
I needed some baddgeridge dragfaced pavers, and my builders merchants don't stock it anymore. So I Have to get it from Jewsons. I dont have an account
I speak to someone, place an order,and I state I need the goods a week on wednesday. They will take 7-10 days I was told. Fine
He asks how I am going to pay, and I said would a cheque on delivery be ok?. No because it is not our company delivering them.
"ok , I said, I will pay for them over the phone."
"sorry, it is illegal for us to sell you the goods if they are not going to the cardholders address!")
I couldnt believe What I was hearing, only last week tesco broke the law when I ordered some flowers for the missus to be delivered to her work. I paid with a credit card.
I have had to send a cheque, which means a delay to my job, and inconvenience for the customer!
Has anyone else come across this? (incidentally, no other builders merchant operates this policy to my knowledge)
Dan the Crusher Man
01442 212315 www.crusherhire.co.uk
"a satisfied customer? we should have them stuffed!"
i have always wondered why they were so big in the BM game i refuse to spend money there unless ALL else fails and that is not very often. But i would not be suprised if it was half french / half german.
Gentlemen, I realise I'm only a colonial, but I cannot believe that any company anywhere in the world would purposely make it difficult to buy from them -- sort of defeats the purpose of being in business, I'd reckon.
I didn't post yesterday, but perhaps I should have. Whilst I understand that banking and credit laws are different in the UK than here in the US, this sounds suspiciously much more like a badly misinformed customer service agent than a company policy.
If it were indeed illegal to ship things to addresses other than the billing address for the cardholder, there are cases where you'd have someone trying to deliver, say, a television, to a postbox somewhere...not likely to happen, as UPS, Parcelforce, etc., won't deliver to postboxes. Similarly, Amazon, Tesco Online, and all the other online retailers would be unable to send products anywhere as a gift -- which would to a large extent defeat the entire purpose of buying gifts online -- and I KNOW they wouldn't want to do that!!! Dan's purchase of roses for his missus (good on you!!!) is a prime example that it CAN happen, and likely IS NOT illegal.
Further, no allowing a drop ship on a credit card would be particularly disastrous to Jewson's, as I'd be willing to bet that 90+ percent of their sales are NOT installed anywhere NEAR the billing address of their credit card customers. I can hear from here the roar coming from industrial estate owners across England (and wives, too, for those of you working from your homes!) if you lot had to start taking possession of all of your shipments at your offices, only to try to then get it collected and delivered to your jobsite
Vendors everywhere are trying to clamp down on credit fraud, as it is a global problem, and not all of the solutions are practical...
I realise it's 20/20 hindsight, but you might want to ring a supervisor at Jewson's and see if that's *really* the policy.
And please play nice -- we all have to live together on this planet, and we all make stupid mistakes sometimes. Don't want to come off as all hearts and flowers, but I make my living dealing with people from all corners of the globe -- and we can all be pretty dumb -- but we can all be pretty decent folks sometimes, too.
Play nice? The English don't have a good word for anyone, including themselves! :p
I've heard of similar problems ordering materials with a credit card - a very affluent lady not from these isalnds but residing in North London with a card than has no known spending limit, fell out with her local branch of Jewsons when they wouldn't take her cc order for some unspecified reason (I suspected a touch of racism). She marched out of the sales office, crossed the road to a bank, withdrew cash and went back. I remonstarted with her that she should take her business to Moran's, BuildBase or even Travis Bloody Perkins but she was intent on showing the ignorant tosser behind the counter that she had the money and the wherewithal to outwit him.
What angers me more than the strange attitude of BMs to cc's is the attitude to non-account holders. It costs more to pay cash, there and then, than it does to pay at the end of the following month on an account. How can that make economic sense?
One supplier I've traded with for years gives me a 40% discount on list price for drainage. On a recent project in S.Yorkshire, I accompanied the client to the local branch of this supplier, because he wanted to buy the goods himself, paying in crispy new 20 quid notes. However, the sales monkey wouldn't offer any discount at all, regardless of whether I was an account holder or not, and insisted that the prices listed in the catalogue were 'Trade Prices'. I made a call to the manager of my local branch (which is also their northern HQ), who made a call to the sales monkey's handler, and the price was immediately dropped by 25% - the best they could do at that branch, allegedly.
How can cash now be less attractive to a business than cash in 60 days time?
There are several issues here. First, to Tarmac Lady, I would say that businesses in Britain have no notion of "customer service", they think firms exist to pay wages, not to serve their customers.
As for Tony's last question, the answer is easy. If you take cash you have to employ people who can count.
