Someone set up us the bottle
Hi, I had the strangest encounter yesterday. I went with a friend to pick up an argon gas cylinder he bought on ebay from an ebay dealer. The dealer-part is kind of important here because Austrian law promises the customer a 14-day right to return the merchandise.
The price was very low (almost too low for Austria) and we had to go to the far end of a small town (we saw a lot of cattle :)) to go to the merchants place. I’ve picked up a lot of stuff over the years and I was always going with someone inside to get the stuff – not here. A young guy carried the bottle outside after we waited for some minutes.
So – far so good. Then my friend made the lucky mistake of asking to weight the bottle. He mistook a 50 l bottles weight for the 20 l bottles weight. Initially the young guy was all about putting it on a weighing machine but his, I think, father got to the scene and declared us for some idiots for not knowing, that inert gases are not measured in weight but in pressure. Well technically true but what’s the problem anyway?
The answer is him: strangely he ranted all about how argon has no weight and he could only measure the pressure.
We both were ??? and just said okay so let’s measure the bottle. So one went in and got a pressure regulator. Suddenly the told us, that we were obliged to buy the bottle if they attached it. My friend just smiled and told em’ that this was just not true, because they were acting as official dealers and therefore he could return it for 2 weeks. This somehow triggered a pain response and the two jokers ranted on for 5 minutes on how we could say such a thing and they would not sell to us because obviously we were bad news and we do not have any idea on welding and on and on.
In the end we both left very unsatisfied and angry. We had a beer afterwards and in the end it was funny. I promised to write a blog-post about it.
Analysis
In the moment my friend asked to weigh the thing the guys had 3 options:
a) just weigh the thing and make a sell
b) tell us about our mistake, attach a regulator and make a sell
c) show us a delivery notice or an invoice and make a sell
Of course they took option d) upset your customer by declaring him an idiot. My point is, that if my friend had not made this lucky mistake we probably would have bought the thing from these shady folks.
The other thing that made them kind of shady was the pressure they built up by pointing out how much more such a bottle would cost at a regular dealer like Lagerhaus and Zgonc (both rather expensive). I had a feeling like some pusher or real estate dealer wanted to sell me a faulty flat where there is a subway below and a landfill in the backyard.
From the first minute I felt we should not take this thing. The older guy had a dark suntan, maybe he got a little too much sun because I never ever saw such a bad behaviour from a merchant. This was the exact opposite of good customer service.
They could have easily made a sell by just being nice. Now we will tell everybody how this went down.
Shouldn’t I leave a merchant with a good feeling? These clowns were verbally aggressive from the first minute and seemed kind of afraid from taking a measurement. Maybe there was something fishy, maybe not but their acting didn’t help at all removing any doubts. When I buy such a bottle from Linde, Lagerhaus or Zgonc I trust them, simply because they are so big. I surely won’t trust someone selling from a backyard – he has to build trust, not piss the customer off.
Luckily my father will go to Germany next week and he will pick up a bottle there for 3/4 of the price from a chain.
In the end we were just pissed, they built a little bad rep and we get the bottle anyway.
Now I ask you. How would you react to this? I really don’t get what was up with them.
So long,
your AE
