There is something wrong in the land of the Supers (Walmart and Target). For anyone who has followed me for awhile it’s well known that my feelings regarding customer service at Walmart have been pretty strong.

Lately, however Walmart has been paying attention to those complaints and I can’t honestly remember the last issue I have had with a given transaction. They are polite, price match without hesitation (they will match the size but that makes sense) and it’s been along time since I have been hassled over a coupon.

So how has Target been doing during this transition for Walmart from the dark side to the light side, you might ask? HORRIBLE! I wrote earlier that Target has been advertising their price matching just like Walmart. I don’t know how long they have been doing it, but they are touting it now. What a great thing to be able to take advantage of other store’s sales as well as the double dipping of adding Target’s coupons to manufacturer ones. I went there today to take advantage of the deals I read about on Money Saving Mom

I had $2/2 coupons for $.99 products as well as $1/1 coupons for $.99 products. I also had three $1/1 target coupons for $1 products.

Every single one of these caused me problems!

I’ve been hearing other people complain about the problems they are having on using coupons especially Target’s own coupons, and I have noticed things becoming a bit more difficult in my recent trips, but nothing prepared me for what I encountered when I tried to check out this afternoon!

All of a sudden instead of getting overages for the coupon, their machine now tells you that the product doesn’t exist! The cashier apologized and got her manager who told her to change the value of the coupon.

Interesting thing to note here; after changing the amount I was getting off for the coupon they also wrote the value they’d counted on the front of the coupon! I’ve always found it distasteful that other stores could change the value but claim the entire amount back! They seem to be so concerned with us legally getting the overage and yet they steal it from the manufacturer on the other side!

At any rate, they changed the value of the two sets of coupons that would have given back overages and then went onto the three Target coupons.  I know they say one per transaction after this I’m a bit concerned about trying to get multiple items with DIFFERENT Target coupons at once but I can tell you that sometimes they will just run it through all at once.  I am, of course happy to accommodate in any way possible, whether it means doing multiple transactions or not.  This time, however, after removing the two extra items from my order, I was informed that to Target a transaction means a TRIP!!! She actually said the words…”In order to use that coupon you will have to physically leave the store and come back.”  Now let me tell you I might have been willing to walk out the door and back in for free apples (there were no $.99 lb apples in my Target), but it’s so not worth it for a bag of Quaker bites that I would never have bought in the first place but hey free is free right? and I doubt it’s worth it for anyone else either.

In the end of this transaction read trip which resulted in the sending away of 4 customers behind me, suspending the order to wait for a manager, running the coupons twice due to a price discrepancy, turns out they’d still charged me for the extra Quaker bites, even though I didn’t HAVE them in my bag, I finally got my order completed for the price I expected to pay.

An hour and a half of my life I’m never gonna get back.

I’ve been watching the decline of customer service, products etc over the course of the last few months, which I will go into more detail soon.  Is this what we have in store for us going forward?  It’s a disturbing thing when the Supers switch sides.