Canadian Tire Complaint Letter

It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but I succesfully cut two one meter lengths of chain. I then headed to the cash. I decided to try the self check-out.

When I was ready to scan the chains, I had to call for help. The attendent informed me that she needed a code in order to ring the order through. She then called for someone from hardware to come and price the chain.

Five minutes later, she had to use a phone to call for someone to come price the price as no one answered her radio call. Five minutes after that someone came to the cash to help out.

When the situation was explained to this person, their reaction was "we sell those by the foot". I was so taken aback by this that I didn’t respond.

Another five minutes went by until we got the answer. And even then, it was not satisfactory. The person came back with my chain, laid both pieces on the ground and measured them with her arms. I was charged based on that precise method.

I chose to say nothing about this at the time due to the fact that I had a fussy five month-old who needed to go home for lunch.

I have several concerns about what transpired.

First, the difficulty in finding help. This is not an isolated event. Getting someone to help borders on ridiculous in your stores. My husband and I have experienced it so much that we joke about it. It appears that even your workers have difficulty finding help.

Second, given the first problem, it is ridiculous to expect a customer to find someone to cut chain or rope. You should make this a self serve, like the bulk aisle in the grocery store. Customers could then cut and label their own, based on the code on the bucket. You wouldn’t even have to worry about measuring. If you programmed the weight of the chain into your computer, then that computer could calculate the length using the weight the scale in the self-check out registered. In other words, one link weighs one gram and is one cm long, than one hundred links would weigh one hundred grams and be one hundred cm long.

Finally, why are you selling chain in lengths based on a foot? Canada went metric thirty years ago. You should be selling it in meters. You trade on your "Canadian" identity in your advertising, admonishing consumers like me to be patriotic. Why are you then using imperial? Does Industry Canada know about this? It is my understanding that Canadian Law says that wieghts and measures are to be in metric. This is not supposed to be optional.

Not that measurement was very important given that that your employee estimated based on the width of her armspan, a system that imperial itself was based on. Which is why metric was invented, to standardize measurement and avoid confusinon. She could have simply converted my two meters to two yards and a bit, given how exacting she wasn’t being.

Really, quite a disappointing experience that is making me rethink shopping at your store, especially when I can easily get most things you offer from another Canadian retailer.