Terms and conditions apply...
Few days back, we did some shopping in Central, and they offered these coupons when we were done with the billing. It had almost discount for every segment. Usually I prefer not to do shopping, unless its needed. We did the first shopping to buy some clothes for the kids. Dussehra or Vijayadashami is the biggest festival of the year - and that was the reason, we bought new clothes for kids. Usually there are 4-5 festivals in a year, when we buy new clothes for kids as a tradition. These discount coupons made us return - the lady wanted to buy something to utilize these coupons. And who can say NO to the HOME ministry 😀. After reaching there, they thought, they would utilize few coupons at the least. My daughter picked couple of tops.
Then the search for something for the lady started. I am not sure, how you guys give company in finding her the perfect choice, but from my experience, I feel, most of the time she does not know what she wants but still want to buy the best choice. So I give company in finding her some items, so that she could pick few from them and we can finish the shopping. Interestingly our choice match most of the time, but there are exceptions. I am more in favor of traditional outfits, that are comfortable as well. So the hunt began to find out some good ones and here are few collections, that we looked upon.
I liked the above one most - kind of modern with a gorgeous look. Still wanted to give her few choices - if you give just one dress to a woman, I am sure, she will reject it 😀
After seeing all these for more than a hour, she said she does not like any of them and rather would go for a modern dress. I gave up🤓 and asked them to find out and come back to the billing counter.
Here was the one, she finally picked with one other. And then on our way to the billing counter, there were these lovely attractive ornaments. She wanted to pick few of them, but I said, let's first see which coupons we can use and then you can pick few quickly.
When the billing guy billed it, there was a very small discount on the dresses she picked - some 200/-. The dress was priced at around 2.5k and he told us, these coupons cannot be applied on them because they are discounted. Few of the coupons were ideally written to be applicable on anything above 2k. Even though, we insisted that, he must honor what was written, he started pointing us to the back side of the coupon - the terms and conditions. They are written very small, and I was frustrated to hear that. He was saying go back and bring some items, that does not have any discount on them. By then, we had already spent more than couple of hours and kids were really hungry. Felt like they planned cheating us in this festive season in the name of discount.
My wife insisted we just leave that place and do not take anything. But I know, if she has choose something, she will have some feelings for that, if not bought. So we just picked one top and the dress that she tried. We had planned for lunch outside and I took them to a nice place to cool them off, will post about it.
The shop has given me a message to share some feedback. I will share this post with them and also share this as part of my google review. Giving such coupons to customers is like cheating people - they should instead give unconditional discount to loyal customers. First time I had bought items worth 11k - this was definitely not the reward of that. I started shopping in Central a decade back when it started first at M.G. Road Bangalore, since then it has grown a lot and recently acquired by Reliance. After Reliance acquired, they even stopped paying rewards in one of the reward card. Looks like they are now only for profit without any ethics.
Edit : Google review at https://goo.gl/maps/aYkxGGwTzwF4eDke7