We recently bought some new wellington boots from a major DIY chain. I won’t mention the name but it did feature in a joke from the early days of lockdown: “I’m at the DIY store / How big is the queue? / Oh, the same size as the B”! There wasn’t a problem with the boots as boots but Jane found that, despite going a size above her regular shoes, the ones she got didn’t slip on and off easily. Since we’re more likely to use them on wet grass at a campsite than tramping through boot-sucking mud, that counts as a bug rather than a feature and we decided to return them.

In some ways, the process was easy. I’d carefully cleaned them as there were a couple of bits of grass on the bottom from the one time she had tried them and discovered the problem but that wasn’t even checked. However, a couple of things made the process much slower and more complex than perhaps it ought to have been. Firstly, we had to wait for ages to get help at a till. Staff numbers seem to be low and there wasn’t a dedicated returns or help desk. Secondly, we had to go through a process of returning the boots, getting a credit note and then using the credit note to purchase a replacement set one size up. I’m glad we had the foresight to pick up the replacement pair first or that would have been an extra walk up and down the store and even more complication if they didn’t have them in stock.

Given that it was a like for like replacement, in terms of stock line and price, it would surely have been more efficient to place the returned pair in a box for later sorting and just let us walk away with the replacement pair. Even if there was a bit more checking involved, it would have saved everyone time and improved rather than slightly dented our impression of the store.