Fri Oct 06, 2023 5:51 am
What a joke.....can't believe they were ever considering not taking it back.
When I started at Cabela's it was in customer service/cashier two years before they IPO'ed. This was back when Dick & Mary Cabela would fly to every store to personally handout Christmas bonuses to every employee. I learned a ton about customer service from working at Cabela's. Things they taught me and every other employee......
If a person has a bad customer service experience....on average they'll tell eight people about it. If they are treated with an otherworldly amazing customer service experience....on average they'll tell two people.
Cabela's took back anything and everything.....literally.....I never saw a single returned denied.
Old farmers would bring in old worn out cabela's clothes, boots, coats, you name it. There was a catalog code on every tag we could look up, and it wasn't uncommon to look up a pair of old pants or other apparel to find out if it was still made and what amount to give them on a gift card for the return.....
.....only to find out the last time the item was made was ten to twenty years prior.
It didn't matter. We'd return it, and give them in-store credit at the very least.
We took back so many broken fishing poles where the customer had clearly broken the rod due to their own stupidity and not from normal use or due to a decent it was sickening. There was a page in the employee handbook pertaining to this that listed an example that went [paraphrasing] like this:
"If a customer walks out to their car with a new rod and breaks it in their car door?
Exchange it for a new one.
If they walk out and break it in their car door again?
Exchange it for a new one.
If they walk out and break it in their car door again?
Exchahge it for a new one.....AND then offer them your assistance by asking,
"Would it be alright if I walked out with you and helped you load this in your car so you can go fishing instead of having to waste more of your time exchanging out a broken rod? I'd love to help you get out fishing."
Do Not ever embarrass the customer or make them feel less than for breaking a fishing rod."
Then the company went public and customer service went to shit overnight. Our store went from having six cashiers on every night to closing, to having two on and closing early in the winter months after Christmas. They tried to cut costs at every corner. Employee hours, store hours (to reduce the lighting and heating bill), no more bonuses, and yup....
....we started denying some returns. That twenty old worn out pair of pants that the farmer wanted to bring back because, "they didn't fit how they should," started getting a,
"Whelp, you should've returned them twenty years ago instead of wearing them until they're all worn out. You got your use out of them," which was true and how it probably always should've been, but then again their customer service is a large part of what propelled Cabela's to take off.
My brothers and I would sit in the family room eating a snack after school and flip through Cabela's catalogs relentlessly dreaming of what items we might be able to order. When the store opened in Owatonna I was sixteen and drove my younger siblings there.....it was jaw-dropping stepping in there and looking around. By far the most amazing, coolest, and greatest singular shopping experience in my life. Like kids in the Rockefeller toy store from a Christmas movie.
Nowadays kids don't hunt or fish, don't flip through catalogs, and don't shop in stores. Cabela's is dead and I'm surprised has hung on as long as they have. Think of the added overhead it takes for them to sell anything compared to the same item being sold off Amazon.......cost to pay all the employees, heat the store, turn the lights on, keep the Aquariums with the right temp, aeration, fish food, or pump the waterfall full of clean water instead of nasty algae filled green shit....property taxes, insurance, payroll taxes, etc.
A Cabela's store more closely resembles an amusement park than it resembles an Amazon shipping facility. It blows me away they're somehow still in business. Their overhead has to be ten, twenty, maybe even fifty times what Amazon's is. How they're able to sell similar items at similar prices....similar as within 5% versus not being marked up 50% to a 100% to a 1000% higher than Amazon? Doesn't seem possible.....
....and it isn't, and that's why they won't be around much longer.
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