All of the customers in my family mattress store have been very nice and appreciative of my excellent service. You can actually purchase a mattress from my store and my crew will follow you home, install the mattress where it goes, set your frame up and even attach you headboard and or footboard and haul away the trash for twenty dollars. You can imagine how bad it can be when a customer takes advantage of us and scams us.

Now for my worst customer. This woman purchases an upper end mattress at my store. Our policy is to be somewhat flexible on price and or service. My salesman winds up giving her free delivery for the mattress set and a free metal frame with a $50.00 price tag. She informs the sales person that she will need some help juggling this bed set with another bed set and the old bed set needs to be taken upstairs. The salesman agrees, after all this is a big sale.

My delivery guys bring her new mattress and box spring in. They are informed that the new mattress set is to be installed on her new bedroom set and the old mattress set must go upstairs and the new frame that we threw in on the deal needs to be set up and the old mattress put on it. She asks them to carry her old set upstairs, and install the new frame under it. Next they find out that the store that she purchased the new bedroom set from did not set the headboard and footboard up in her bedroom and she expects us to do this so we can put the new mattress set that we sold her on it. My delivery crew cheerfully install the new set. In all, two men spend an hour in her house for no compensation. Of course when they leave after going beyond the call of duty, there is no tip.

Evidently the store that she purchased her bedroom set from, talked her into a new mattress set and assured her that we would be happy to take her now used set back, no problem. She has been sleeping on our new mattress set all of this time but that is another story. Ohio law says that we can not sell a mattress that has been slept on unless we buy a license to sell used goods, red tag the mattress as used and spray the mattress with a strong insecticide. She is pounding on the counter with her fist and creating a scene.

My salesman makes a correct executive decision in this matter and tells her fine, we will take the mattress set back. The other option was to call the police but then she would have cancelled her charge on her Visa card. So like a bunch of fools, we go to her house and bring the mattress set back. They also attempt to bring the $50.00 bed frame back but she refuses them entry into upstairs. The set comes back to the store and we look it over and there are no pee stains so since we can not sell it, we use it as a floor sample.

Now we have to refund the money. She absolutely refuses to compensate us for all of the labor that we burnt up in her house. Then, amazingly, she is shocked and upset that we are subtracting the fifty dollars from her refund for the bed frame she kept. Her point is that she received it free with the purchase so it was a gift and should remain free. We did not return her fifty dollars for the bed frame.

I wanted to ban her from the store but I was kind of outvoted by the rest of my employees. They felt that it would be bad to add gasoline to whatever sparks were left and she might sue us. She still probably complains about us to whoever will listen. I would think about this woman, weeks later and still be angry. The soup guy in Seinfeld had some of it right. Life is too short to deal with some customers and the only way to convince some of these people how bad they are is to have them drive down a busy business street and realize that they are banned from some of the stores. It will eventually sink in. We are grateful for the many caring customers who vote for our store with their dollars.