Archive for April 15th, 2008

April 15th, 2008
21 comments

PacSun Customer Services Goes From Horrible to Helpful in 24 Hours

If you are looking for the unlisted phone number to report a complaint about an in-store experience with PacSun, please scroll to the end of this post.

This particular experience began in early March of 2008. I was in need of a new belt as mine had become tattered and worn after about a year of use. I decided that since this belt had held on pretty well, that I would go purchase another belt from the same vendor.

The store in this case is PacSun located in Missoula, Montana in Southgate Mall. I had gone to the store many times before and even knew a person who worked there.

Let me start by saying that I have been a patron to this store since it started in the early nineties. Mostly because the Bullhead brand of jeans that they sell fit me better than jeans I can get elsewhere. In fact, I remember when it was still called Pacific Sunwear.

I went in and purchased a black spiked belt not unlike this one:

Keep in mind, I do web application development for a living so I am not constantly engaged in activities which would cause an abnormal amount of wear upon a belt. However, after only a month of owning the product, it snapped completely in half while putting it on one morning. So Bonnie and I went back to the store with the intentions of receiving a refund for such an obviously shoddy product.

We walked into the store and a younger gentleman behind the counter asked if he could help us. We explained that we would like to return a belt and held up the broken product. He said he would grab someone else to help us. A small, female employee approached us and asked us what was up. We explained to her that we had purchased the belt just a month ago and already it broke completely in half. Then she said to hold on while she went to the back. At this point, the gentleman piped up and jokingly said: “Don’t worry, we’ll find someone who know what they’re doing.”

After a minute or two the employee emerged from the back and went to back to the counter and started going through a notebook. While she was looking for something (she didn’t tell us what she was doing), she was able to find the time to help another employee looking for what appeared to be a display guide. After a few more minutes of just standing there, she said that they could give us a new belt or give us store credit. I plainly said that I didn’t want to replace the belt with another one because I was worried it would also break. She stated that it was company policy. “If it broke after a couple of days, then I wouldn’t mind,” she said. “You can trade this (holding up the belt) for a brand new one or get store credit.”

I then asked, “What do I do if the next belt breaks on me again then?” This received no response and an odd look. She then pointed to the bit of wear that had started to occur around the buckle of the belt and said, “This is obviously really worn down.” Of course, the belt snapped in half in the middle of the belt, not near any worn areas. Then the male employee said, “Yea, I’ve got belts that are 4 years old that don’t have that much wear on them.” I responded with, “So, what: I’m wearing my belt wrong? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” He giggled. I wanted to smack the silly haircut off of his head.

At this point the female employee was getting agitated and said “Look you can take the new belt or get store credit. That’s company policy.” My fiancee then referred to the return policies listed on a small sign on the front of the counter saying “There’s nothing on this sign that says it’s store policy to not refund obviously defective items.” The response? “Well, I know it’s not listed there, but that’s how it is.”

At this point it was obvious that none of the employees helping us had any idea what customer service was so I asked if there was some kind of corporate number available. She responded flippantly with: “I’ll see what I can find.” She indicated towards the receipt (which both Bonnie and I interpreted as: “It’s on the recepit.”), placed the stuff in a bag and handed it to us. Upon leaving the store, there was no number on the paper given to us and we had a store credit for a product that was obviously faulty.

The next morning, I decided to look for a number on the internet to call and report this behavior. Guess what? PacSun does not list their number for in store customer service complaints ANYWHERE on their site or (after a Google search) on the internet. I decided to call the website phone number. When I spoke with someone on the phone, they indicated that they could not help me and gave me the number to call. He then added, “You’re going to have to leave a message and then someone will call you back within 48 hours.”

WHAT?! You mean to tell me that customers, who are irate because of an in-store experience, have to call a number (if they can find it) and leave a message with the hope that someone will call them back? That’s probably the worst consumer customer complaint handling that I have ever heard of.

So he connected me, I left a message, and assumed I wouldn’t hear anything for quite a while.

Shortly after I returning home from work, I received a call asking for me by my first name. The woman on the phone then asked me to tell my story of the PacSun experience to her. After listening to my story, she informed me that the staff on that day was full of inexperienced people who had been there for less than 4 months. She apologized profusely and said that she would be talking to the store manager about scheduling a better mix of experienced and inexperienced people. She offered me a coupon for $25.00 off a $50.00 purchase with no expiration date and said that we would be able to use our gift card in conjunction with the coupon because of the terrible experience. She then gathered my information and apologized some more.

The woman on the phone (Cindy B. – District Manager) was extremely helpful, very kind and honest about the situation. That was all I was looking for from the store employees. They should have acknowledged the product was faulty, refunded the money, and been far more helpful for a customer who was obviously in a distressed situation.

When all was said and done: the experience with the district manager helped to save an otherwise horrible interaction in the store and I will probably go back there to buy more jeans. However, I will definitely not be buying a belt from them any time soon.

[UPDATE]: Cindy B. went above and beyond with the package that I received. It was shipped 2-day mail and included a hand-written apology note and two Bullhead brand t-shirts along with the promised $25 off card. Now that’s what I call customer service.

By the way: here is the COMPLETELY UNLISTED phone number for reporting a bad in store experience with PacSun:

1-800-444-6770 – extension 5030

Also, I asked Cindy B. about the fact that in-store complaints are handled through voicemail. Apparently, there is one person who checks the voicemail and then disperses it to the proper channels. Just a suggestion PacSun? Let pissed off customers talk to someone on the phone. Don’t make them leave a message.

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Category: Misc | Tags:
April 14th, 2008
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Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch Appointed to the Associated Press Board of Directors

Just when you thought the mainstream media couldn’t get more convoluted and controlled, on April 14th, 2008, the Associated Press announced their new members for their board of directors.

The Associated Press is the last remaining nationally oriented news service in the United States. It is a service that can reproduce stories that are published with American news organizations that belong to the organization. Companies can then pay a fee to the Associated Press to reproduce the story in other countries/languages.

However, the latest appointees to the board of directors definitely points to a bid for control and power.

Here are the 4 new members:

Just look at the massive amount of media these companies control.

In a world where the major news media outlets are falling to the online availability and dispersal of information that comes with the internet, it is not surprising that the heads of these news outlets are coming together to decide what and how news is delivered to the rest of the world. However, I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that none of these appointees are there for our interests in any way, shape, or form.

For more information and the original story, check out this link.

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Category: Misc | Tags: ,
April 10th, 2008
16 comments

PHP and Regex – Replacing Repeating Characters with Single Characters in a String

[Update] – a comment left by TLP gives a much better solution to the problem that seems to be better in benchmarks as well. I’m changing the post to reflect the best and fastest method for the situation described.

In a previous post, I described a situation where we needed to remove a repeating dot in a user name. In this article, I mentioned the first site that came up when searching in Google to find a solution.

I thought that I might have come across something that would be a solution for what this person was looking for. However, they clarified what they needed the function to do on their website and left me a comment with some more info:

“Thanks for citing us but the article was about making a unique chars string. For example: “aabbccaaaaaddee” will become “abcade“. That is what I accomplished in the article. I know very well regular expression and there are some way of accomplishing that but not in one step. Every char of the string must be separated by a separator (ex: comma, pipe, etc) and then apply the lookback regular expression.

The beauty of using regular expressions is this: a lot of steps that are needed to accomplish some string formating/parsing can be done in one step using RegExp. But if there are the same amount of steps it will be faster not to use RegExp.”

I love programming and I definitely love a challenge and so, webdev.andrei: I accept your challenge.

$str = 'aabbccaaaaaddee';
echo preg_replace('{(.)\1+}','$1',$str);
//abcade

This type of simple expression is thanks to a commenter that dropped by named TLP. We’ll try break it down to see how it works. The curly braces {(.)\1+} without a number in the middle means to repeat it as many times as needed until it no longer occurs. The round brackets {(.)\1+} create something called a backreference. A backreference allows it to reuse part of the regular expression match in the expression itself. So, when it comes to the first character repeating more than once, it will replace it with a single version of itself (or $1). It then places itself back in at the location of the backslash-1 {(.)\1+}.

Throughout the night until the wee hours of the morning I was furthering my ‘regex-fu’. I ultimately came to a simple loop that seems to satisfy the issue.

$string = 'aabbccaaaaaddee';
$new_string = '';
$starting_char = 0;
while (strlen($string) > 0 && $starting_char < strlen($string)) {
    $blah = preg_match('/[A-z]{2,}/', $string, $matches);
    $letter = $matches[0][$starting_char];
    $new_string .= $letter;
    $regex = '/' . $letter . '{2,}/';
    $string = preg_replace($regex, $letter, $string);
    $starting_char++;
}
echo $new_string;

In short: it tries to find a repeating character. When it finds one, it replaces it with a single version of itself. Now that it knows the first repeating instance is now a single character in the string, it can move on to the next character of the string and try that one out. It does this until there are only single instances of each character left in the string.

And there you have it. This could be done with any number of different characters by altering the first line of the loop and inputting a different range of characters instead of [A-z].

I hope this helps others and especially hope that webdev.andrei can get some use out of it.

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Category: Geekery | Tags: ,
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