So today I went to London with my 50% off coupon that I printed off, only to be humilated and leave the Zellers store feeling like a criminal. I printed this yesterday evening and had planned to buy myself a pair of earrings. I live one hour from London. Add that to the 45 minutes I spent looking at items and waiting a while for an associate to even come the the jewel counter. Thats 1.45 hours of life wasted. Wasted because when I went to use my coupon, I was informed that Zellers has revoked the offer.
Excuse me? Revoked? I have the offer right here. I was then told that they decided that it was no long valid on sale items. Hold up? No longer valid? Are you kidding me? Since when?
I was treated like a piece of trash, by the (apparent) manager and was basically called a liar. As it was “impossible” for me to have printed this last night. So I shouldn’t even have a 50% off coupon at all. Well I did. I had no intent to act maliciously with the coupon, nor had I even heard of this “change” to the coupon. Not only that but who runs this place? Finally this week Zellers brought traffic into their quite and lonely stores and perhaps earned more faith with shoppers. How do they embrace this change? Squash it by infuriating and belittling their customers. Great move Zellers, dig your hole deeper. I should of just went and bought a shovel and handed it to the manager. I can understand it has been a very popular coupon for them, but it was pulled because it was too popular? Who is your marketing team? It wouldn’t take a baby genius to know that this was going to drive the most traffic to Zellers ever. I don’t get you Zellers corp. I really don’t. There is no way this was a “mistake” your rep on Facebook posted over and over, yes it’s valid on sale items. Let me check with head office. Yes it’s valid. Over and over.
I have never felt so badly treated in all my life in a store. Why not at least honour those customers that were trying to honestly use the coupon. As for the “notices” posted… I was told all they had was a notice posted at the front entrance door. Nothing at the mall entrance. Nothing with the flyer stands etc.
I have talked to Customer Support and I’m awaiting an outcome. As it stands right now they need to make this right with me or I will never support or step foot in their chain again.
I am soooo happy all those rude zellers staff wil soon lose their jobs
Like many coupons I print,for whatever reason they are never used,this one included.I do feel relieved I didn’t make the trip for nothing.
I braved it yesterday with my 3 days old daughter, only to be told that it was not on sale items. I was so mad.
I just wished the cashiers were all doing the same thing.
The line I was in had a b*tchy cashier that would not let anything go through. She held up the line for 2 minutes because a customer would not say the word “cucumber”. On the other line, the cashier was letting anyone use as many coupons as they want all at once. One lady had 10 coupons at once.
Guess which line I ended up on? No more Zellers. They really pissed a lot of people off. What a bitter note for a store to leave on.
You guys are being to mean, zellers probably noticed people using more than one coupon, the same people probably printing out 100 coupons and going back and cheating them, so they go tired of the crap, how can you expect them to make any profit?, Why dont they JUST give it to you fOR FREE .…How do you expect them to stay in buisness like that?
ITs people like some of you guys , the reason that our canadian buisnesses are going bankrupt,and handing us over to the americans
Zellers has pretty good SALES and prices to begin with, you shouldn’t complain.
I am soooo happy all those rude zellers staff wil soon lose their jobs
- SOmeone said this–
yes there are a few bad ones, But this statement is pretty nasty!
Oh , and the people that even admitted to using more than 1 coupon, YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING ILLEGAL SO how DARE you Get angry or yell at them for not honouring your coupon!!
Zellers is a horribly run operation. It looks like this little fiasco has backfired on them big time. I too created a big stink in my local store. Good ridense, soon they will be gone. Show HBC what you think with your feet — boycott all HBC stores.
ib — it has been established for days its now regular priced items only, so why are you upset that YOU went into the store and they confirmed that for you…
and i agree pro someone else said they would hit a manger over the head with a shovel… i guess this is a joke (?) but not very funny at all.
To all those lovely people who are happy all the Zellers staff will lose their jobs. You should be ashamed of yourselves. We are just regular people trying to make a living and provide for our families. I’ve worked for Zellers for 20 years and, I’ve worked with some amazing people over the years. We try to do the best job we can with what we’re given. I think Target would be lucky if they hire some of the people I work with. They are some of the hardest working people I know.
I can’t believe all this hate over a coupon???? Its one thing to attack a company’s policy, but its another to attack the people unlucky enough to have to enforce it. I don’t agree with Sears’ return policy but, I’m not going to attack the sales person who has to enforce that policy.
I’m very hurt by this nasty thread.
I am shocked at some of these comments as well in this thread and quite honestly saddened for all involved as I can understand the frustrations of both sides but to quite literally take it out on the Zellers staff who are only trying to make a living for their families and a roof over their head is very disrespectful–it is not their fault that they work for a company who cannot honour their offers–please guys, show the world smart canuck’ers are not rude jerks but rather people who just want to share some deals!
Please chin up, get past this and enjoy the new year!
Zellers will soon be gone and I feel for the people who may find themselves unemployed—think about that before you take it out on them! Lord love a duck, lots of cashiers drive me crazy too but they are being scolded by upper management about these issues and only want to preserve their paychecks!
Remember Linen n’ Things a while ago—that’s all I am going to say!
Everyone enjoy your first day of 2012 and do something fun with your family!
I went to the Zellers in Montreal, no problem at all to use the coupon. I think it really depends on the locations and cashiers, especially, in QC, I think most of the francophone cashiers, they are really “whatever”
I went at Zellers yesterday here in Mississauga and bought big box of diapers and I was able to use this coupon.
I think this will end my Zellers shopping…I printed my coupon the day it appeared on Facebook but wasn’t able to get to Zellers until Thursday…and of course I was so upset to find out I couldn’t use the coupon on an item I wanted to purchase. Yeesh I think almost everything was on SALE so what could the coupon be used for? It is obvious that people were abusing the coupon, i.e. using more than one per customer. If Zellers marketing honchos were thinking clearly, they would have required perhaps each customer to enter their email address and/or HBC Rewards # or something to make it not so easy for people to abuse. Of course there are people who have 4, 5, 6 or more email addresses but I think the majority of people are honest would just entered their one email address to get the coupon. Additionally, the coupons could have still been used on sale items, but put some exclusions on it, like not valid on luggage, major appliances, electronics, etc. Anyway I’m tired of being so disappointed with Zellers.
I was hoping to get a Tassiomo but that’s 50% off of $149. price so not a great deal. No deal on sale items or electronics with coupon but anything else was a go. I ended up getting half off a spring blouse at $24.99 reg. So that’s a savings I appreciated and I did get other clothing deals for 30, 40 & 50% off.Okay deals Zellers, thanks!
Shame on the ones glad that Zellers employees will lose their jobs. My daughter is losing her job ay Zellers and she is a hard worker. I know this because I worked with her on her job before Zellers. She also lost that job because the owner sold all the stores. Tough luck!
P.S.
When I used my 50% coupon the cashier was awesome and wanted me to get the best deal for my coupon.
Are people forgetting when Chapters put out a $5 coupon a couple of years ago, with no minimum purchase, and pulled it after a couple of days, and you couldn’t use it at all? Stores reserve the right to cancel or change an offer. They have notices posted on their entrances. Sucks, but that’s how it works.
I experienced the same feeling as you described during your most recent visit to Zellers. I read the retraction was because of the overwhelming response. What did Zellers think the response was going to be?
m. .…
chapters has put this $5 coupon out online every month for the past 6 months. I do not know what you are speaking of?
It’s sad how some of you wishes bad on others. It’s never alright. It’s not the employees fault. It’s a sad thing to lose your job or have the potential hanging over your head. My husband, myself and many friends have went thru that, it’s not a good thing, not anything you would like to wish on anyone.
All the best to all of you, incl. Zellers employees.
I agree-my son got a sale item but we could not-had to go the first morn-their mistake-they will probebly be bought out soon-I do not shop there much any more-no deals
I used my coupon the second day that it was out and was able to get my deal and was so happy with it that I shared the coupon with friends. I hope they were able to use it as well!
i’m sure the ones who which the employee’s loose their job are the one who profit of the error and the inexperinemt of some employee’s. Leave them alone and stop profiting of the store you shop in.
I’m sorry but that’t what I think.
Ce este Margo Cosmetics? http://www.margo-cosmetics.ro
Give up on Zellers. The only good thing is target will absorb some and wipe out the rest of that chain. Marketplace had a show on the worst stores in Canada for customer service. Zellers lost–they are the worst, Canadian tire was second worst. Both of these companies would not talk at all to marketplace and only CTC even bothered to offer compensation for the shopper involved. Zellers in a letter would not compensate the customer involved(staffer from Marketplace and when she opened the coffee brewer she bought found it was dirty, broken and well used instead of new. Zeller swould give her a gift card but would not return the money even thogh they knew Marketplace was involved.
I worked in two different Zellers stores from 1991 to 1997 and have always had fairly strong opinions on why the chain would fail. In the early days of my employment I was working in a very recently converted former Towers store. Immediately I was thrust into an environment full of grumpy employees who were taken over as well, who had their wages frozen indefinitely as the pay scales of Zellers were less generous of those at Towers. It is quite possible that some of these folks were just plain overpaid to begin with, and maybe that’s what killed the Towers chain amongst many other things. Anyways, Zellers did not seem to bring any sense of excitement to anyone. Many felt they were a small fish being gobbled up by a whale. I once overheard a former Towers assistant store manager say that the takeover was handled badly, with no regard for the employees. Surprise surprise. The way Zellers upper management took care of business became more and more apparent as I continued in my employment there.
At first I was hired as a cashier. Before long a full-time position opened up in the Housewares department of the store. I got the position and found myself inheriting a complete disaster. Boxes had been opened, were torn and tattered, merchandise was strewn across the floors, display models were incomplete, missing, or existed for items no longer sold, and items were not where they should have been on the shelves. At first I was shocked, but as time wore on, I realized that I was only expected to have things picked up off the floor and thrown back on the shelf each night, just so that the cleaners could mop the floors. This was a far cry from my previous job in a grocery store where we could not leave the store until everything looked good. This included “facing” items on the shelves– retail lingo for bringing things to the front so that merchandise was accessible and made the shelf look full even if it wasn’t. At Zellers the only time this practice was followed was in the days prior to what we used to call “Royal Visits” when managers above the district manager level would visit. I found this somewhat puzzling. Why didn’t these people leave the visits unannounced and show up dressed like regular joes, and see what the front lines, the stores, actually looked like on a normal basis? These guys, and yes, they were ALL men at the time, mostly grey haired tall men in impeccable suits, wanted everyone employed at the store to make a huge fuss over them.
The sad part about these visits was the way the store manager and department managers were treated. They were essentially given no salary budget, yet were expected to have things looking spic and span at all times. Sometimes the upper management guys would pull a power trip and force a store manager to clean up a department himself while his shocked employees looked on. It was a real power trip for these bullies as they threw their weight around.
Oddly enough, I was encouraged to apply for the store management program, and being a high-school educated kid with nothing to lose, I took them up on the offer. In late 1993 I started my first assignment in another store, and for some time was pleased to be amongst employees that seemed more positive. I was told almost immediately that the store I was now working in had not seen the salary cuts of the previous store, but that they were coming, and come they did. Almost overnight the location went from being a decent place, to the same shithole as the first store. Somehow they thought that less employees would save them enough money to make the store more profitable. In the ensuing year I learned many things about how the company operated, and here is a list of “beefs”:
– Aisles cluttered with junky unnappealing items that were old, tattered or had been returned. We were told NOT to reduce these items to clear. The end result is that they never sold and wasted space. The stationery department was one of the worst examples.
– Sale items were seemingly never in stock. In fact, the store was in stock, but the merchandise was on a pallett deep in the stockroom where no one could get it. The stockroom was tiny, so tiny, in fact, that in stuffing it with more palletts, the aisles between the rows of palletts were eliminated. Essentially we had a block of palletts about 8 across and 10 deep, the only way anyone would find the sale merchandise would be if they hauled each pallett out and stuck it in the aisles of the store. This, of course, was forbidden.
– Outdated computerized inventory system. I’m not sure if it was replaced, but up to 1997 the PIMS system was in place. This system, developed in the 70’s, was supposed to automatically re-order items as they got low. Someone had the great idea of building a little caveat into the system. If the number of items went into a negative, the item would not be re-ordered and a problem would be flagged. Somehow this would keep happening on stuff like sewing items, and since the store didn’t have anyone investigating the problem items, entire aisles were full of empty shelves and pegs. Customers would come back time and time again asking when we would get the items. We essentially looked like idiots when we told them we didn’t know.
– Poor quality merchandise. The worst by far was the shit ass Permatech/Eurotech line of small appliances. Sure they were cheaply priced, but even for $10 I would expect a toaster to work when I plugged it in. We saw the same garbage get returned over and over for years, but they kept selling the junk.
– Credit. These fuckers were making 30% of their profit on credit. You know, the kind of profit that requires people to be slow on their payments so they can reap huge interest charges. Cashiers were hounded to push this on everyone, to the point that they were giving long speils to customers like a Jehovas Witness does at your front door if you don’t slam it on them first. Even worse, Zellers willfully declined to use debit machines in their stores for fear that people would stop using thier credit cards. The finally made the switch sometime after 1997, likely due to customers leaving merchandise at the register and leaving in a huff, vowing to never shop at Zellers again.
– Lack of staff. Did you know that in the 1960’s, American railroad companies tried to save money by deferring maintenance projects? The result was bad track with slow trains, and a mess that ended up costing a fortune to fix, unless of course, they went bankrupt first as customers turned to trucks. Well, Zellers somehow though they could run stores without those pesky employees gobbling up their profits. A prime example of this was how they would let one employee be in charge of helping customers in a 30,000 square foot area on a Sunday afternoon. Why did this happen? Most times there was no one to cover lunches. Other staff had to abandon ship at a seconds notice to open another cash register to reduce exorbitantly long lineups. Cashiers were getting lunch breaks at 2 and 3 in the afternoon “because it was just too busy”. They were made to feel that they were part of some sort of important struggle to help their comrades survive or something. Customers in the meanwhile were looking for help in the aisles, and nobody was there to give it. Once I was working cash in such a situation. An item didn’t scan or had a problem (as was often the case) and the customer asked “why don’t you call the Hardware department?”. My response: “That’s because I AM the hardware department, and for that matter, toys, housewares and linens”.
– Cheesy gimmicks. Zellers was a firm beleiver in this weird sort of 1950’s corny style of advertising and promotions. Instead of trying to sell cool stuff, they resorted to silly balloon drops, flashy flyers, Zeddy, and good old “Zellers Radio”. What was Zellers Radio, you ask? A stupid tape message that would play every 10 minutes that usually began with “Shhhhhaaaappers!!”. The elevator music they played was no better. The grocery store I worked at previously played some classic pop music from the 70’s and 80’s. Still a bit lame, but not as bad as muzak. It seemed they did not want to deviate from the practice of appealing to the senior citizen crowd. The TV ads weren’t any better. For the longest time they were a televised version of the weekly flyer. Later on they got some Hillary Duff clothes in their stores and managed to get some decent ads going. This did not last, and an ad campaign was launched with purported Zellers employees saying “we’re getting better and better”. Wow. Talk about admitting you suck. It’s like they were begging people to give them a second chance, and forgive them for the shit service they gave them before.
– Ridiculous policies for shoppers. Come on, if someone isn’t satisfied, give them their money back. Sure there is always some fucker trying to rip you off, but why treat everyone like criminals? People usually got store credits after getting the runaround and waiting in long lineups. Supervisors would tell their employees to enforce these policies until someon really lost it. What then? Give the customer what they wanted and make the employee look like a complete asshole in front of them. Seems these little Hitlers didn’t have the balls to enforce these policies themselves.
– Clueless upper management. It seems that they only way these morons knew how to react was to fire people. It seemed like management shuffles were happening constantly as someone got the boot for underperforming. And do you know who didn’t get fired? Guys like the Regional Director of Stores who showed up on the front lines during a “Royal Visit” and yelled at people. Such a nice human being.
– Panic at the sight of Walmart, but reacting like a deer in the headlights. Instead of trying to figure out what makes Walmart a generally better place to shop, Zellers instead tried to undercut them on many items, and lost an arm and a leg in doing so. Walmart isn’t just about price. It was also about the “shopping experience” that Zellers never seemed to be able to figure out. It seems the cheaper “solution” to the Walmart question was usually taken. Why make fundamental changes to your stores when you can authorize a 10% cut in prices on ass-wipe?
– Morning meetings. The dreaded daily “pep talk” was nothing more than an attempt into performing better OR ELSE. What was discussed? The weeks sales, which didn’t really register in most people’s minds, and a couple of minutes of badgering employees to get more credit card customers, and just generally work harder if sales were supposed to get better. One time our store manager decided to go off on a rant about employee morale and how the employees had only themselves to blame for it. In his mind the skeleton crew often appointed to run the place, should all work twice as hard to acheive the results of double the people. He couldn’t seem to understand why people were not motivated to shed blood, sweat and tears at minimum wage.
I left the company fifteen years ago. I had always wondered if things had improved after I left, and after reading other people’s blogs posted since the announcement that Target was acquiring Zellers leases, it was obvious they had barely changed at all. It was eerie to read what employees were saying about the company as it was so familiar.
Shame on you Zellers, and good riddance. It’s sad that the employees of the companies are the ones to suffer, while the upper management folks will all leave with a huge chunk of change. Pathetic.