Who would know how much I dislike situations when, having bought something, I come home, open the package, and something is wrong with the product! Either a hook on the knitwear, or a button is missing, or the product has deteriorated.
It’s annoying, but in any case, you face a choice — either carry the goods back to the store, or «swallow» and just throw this thing away. Here, of course, the issue price plays an important role. If the thing is expensive, then you have to go to return it, you can’t get anywhere.
But if it’s a carton of milk, or a small toy? It doesn’t seem to be expensive either. Is it worth spending time, and sometimes nerves (many people have probably faced a situation where they don’t want to take such goods back in the store) to return a low-quality product? On the other hand, you don’t want to feel cheated.
A story happened to me not too long ago. I bought a set for creativity in the Children’s World store. It has a lot of fabric parts that need to be sewn together to make a soft toy. I brought this set home. The child and I did not start it immediately, but after 2 weeks (just the time for the exchange of goods had passed).
We unpacked it, laid out the parts, and began to stitch together in stages. However, to our chagrin, when it came to the spout, we did not find it among other details. Well, there is nothing to do, they collected everything back in the box.
And here is the task before me. On the one hand — a cheap toy, maybe you should not waste time and go to the store for an exchange? A terrible picture immediately appeared before my eyes: I come to the store, explain the situation that there is no nose, they do not believe me, they begin to prove that I have lost this nose. And in general the goods were bought more than 2 weeks ago.
Yes, on top of that, I threw away the check itself, which contains the list of purchases, there was only a check with the total amount debited from the card, where it is not indicated in any way that this set is included in the specified amount.
In general, as soon as I imagined how much I would have to explain, I decided to leave this idea and save my nerves and time.
But one thought haunted me – over the weekend I went through the Foundation of Confidence training, and got specific skills on what to do if you start to doubt yourself. So, I decided to go change the set.
The first thing I thought was that in such a terrible situation, I would definitely be able to work out a calm presence. Next, I will try to defend my boundaries (similar to the Seller-Buyer exercise that we did at the training).
In general, I set myself up psychologically for an unpleasant conversation.
However, after re-reading my notes from the training, I completely forgot about this.
One of the components of inner strength is orientation in one’s own thoughts, time, space
So, instead of the terrible picture with explanations that I imagined so vividly, I began to draw a different picture:
- At first, I was determined that the staff with whom I would communicate would be very friendly;
- Then I prepared a simple text explaining my problem with the toy;
- Of course, I did not mention the fact that the return time was overdue;
- And most importantly, I set myself up for a successful outcome of the case — either they will replace the entire package, or they will give me the missing part (nose).
And with this attitude, I went to the store
I can say that the whole conversation took no more than 3 minutes. I really got a very friendly employee who calmly entered my position and said that if there is another such package, then the part will be taken out of there. If not, then they will take the item back. Fortunately, there was another such package with a set. They gave me my nose without any problems, which I was very pleased with. By the way, they didn’t even look at the check!
I went home and thought how many problems we invent for ourselves. After all, if you set yourself up in advance for a successful outcome of the case, then even if everything does not go quite the way you painted for yourself, then at least there will not be this unsteady unpleasant feeling that everything in this world is against you. The correct psychological adjustment of oneself seriously affects the desired outcome of the case.