Last month I had a frustrating Petco experience when they were holding a special sale. It was eating at me, so I decided to contact them about it last night to see if they’d make it right. Since they don’t have a known email address, I messaged them through Facebook. Below is what I wrote:
I’m writing to express how disappointed I am in Petco with their recent holiday sale. Back in December I was ready to submit my order at DrFosterandSmith.com when I learned that Petco was offering a $15 e-gift card with a $50 purchase so I decided to order from Petco instead. Imagine my surprise when I went to use my $15 and learned it had expired!
Now, I understand I should have read the email with the gift card more thoroughly, but I think it’s pretty misleading to call it a gift card when really it’s more like a coupon. People do not expect a gift card to expire in less than a month! And at the very least those restrictions should be laid out as part of the terms of the sale. The fine print on the website only indicated the gift card would be emailed by 12/19/16. I know this because I took a screenshot which I still have. So in essence you gave me less than two weeks to redeem it (since it expired on 12/31/16).
Needless to say I am wary to keep spending my money at Petco which would be a shame since I just adopted a puppy and I like to spoil her. If you could re-issue me a new $15 gift card that doesn’t expire in a short time frame I would reconsider boycotting Petco in the future.
Thank you.
They responded within minutes letting me know they escalated my concerns and they’d get back to me. This morning they reached out again to let me know I was given a $15 gift card and asked if there was anything else they could do. I promptly checked my email where there was a link to a $15 gift card (which doesn’t expire!) and printed it out to put in my purse. I then thanked them for making things right.
This experience demonstrates that complaining does work if you do it the right way.
And just for posterity below is the screenshot I took which I still had sitting on my desktop because the year before I had an issue with Petco.com where they had the same deal but it had expired even though the deal was still appearing on their website.
