Shopper outsmarts Kohl’s with their own Black Friday return policy, ending up with a full refund, extra store credit, and a $100 gain: ‘They didn’t budge so I did exactly what their policy allowed’

What could be more thrilling than using a corporation's own rules against it, like watching a machine glitch because it forgot people can read. This story starts with a vacuum and ends with poetic justice, but the part that matters is how neatly it exposes the game.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of having to spend something infuriating like 2 hours every day from Monday to Thursday on the phone waiting in line for customer service from my internet provider. And as the hours and days went by, I could see every tiny bit of manners, civility, and politeness I had in my body leave, while I grew angrier, more bitter, and slowly transformed into a Karen. We all know by now that consumer life runs on bad faith. That companies wrap "fairness" in fine print so dense it could double as insulation. They paste friendly slogans on top of systems designed to exhaust anyone who tries to argue. Don't call, don't question, just accept that the sale you missed by three days is your moral failure. Every "policy" is really a moral code written by marketing interns, and you only get to win when you stop believing in the idea of good faith commerce.

That's why the best part of this story isn't that Kohl's lost a hundred bucks. It's that someone did the homework. While customer service scrolled through their script, this person scrolled through policy sections they hoped no one would read. I, on the other hand, spent basically a full week of becoming a resentful monster I couldn't identify in the mirror until on Thursday I was transferred to Customer Retention, where a nice lady, ironically named Karen, apologised, said she absolutely understood my complaints, and gave both a discount and an upgrade!

So what this guy did was'nt rebellion, it's administrative artistry, using the labyrinth to find the exit.

via Miljan Zivkovic

^{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
Kohl’s wouldn’t price match Black Friday, so I followed their policy… very carefully

via u/godzdude
Brands love talking about loyalty. They hand out fake money with expiration dates and call it gratitude. But loyalty only flows one way, and it’s not toward the customer. When someone turns the tables and uses the same system for personal gain, the outrage feels almost moral. As if giant chains have feelings. Sometimes efficiency looks like revenge. A refund processed cleanly, a policy obeyed word for word, and somewhere deep in corporate headquarters, a statistic goes slightly wrong. That’s what winning looks like now, not passion or protest, just reading the terms and clicking submit.
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via Miljan Zivkovic

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