Practice of comfort returns bears uncomfortable results
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David Perry |
We come before you this week with a bold idea: Let’s shelve comfort returns. OK, that may be a pipe dream. But let’s at least find a way to scale back on the excesses in this lamentable retail practice.
The idea of letting consumers sleep on their new mattresses for three months (or more) before returning them for another model is an idea whose time has come and gone. Comfort returns are an expensive proposition for retailers and producers alike. And they introduce far too much used bedding into the pipeline. Do we really know what happens to all of those used beds? Perhaps we don’t want to know.
But we do know that comfort returns have gotten out of hand.
The concept behind those returns sounds like a good one: Consumers need a chance to adjust to their new bedding. But that period of adjustment is probably only a matter of days or perhaps a week or two. Giving consumers a month or two longer to think about replacing their bed is simply not a good idea.
It’s also not wise to plant the seeds of comfort returns so deeply at the point of sale. Retailers who do so are planting seeds of doubt that too often bear bitter fruit for retailers and producers alike.
Part of the problem is that retailers sometimes are selling the wrong beds to consumers. The sales associates aren’t doing their jobs. They are moving through the sales process too quickly. In their push for quantity, quality may suffer.
In many cases, the sales associates bear no consequence for their poor work. The retailers or producers who take the used beds back must deal with the problem.
Some retailers adjust commissions on sales associates whose beds come back. That’s a good idea. Otherwise the sales associates have no skin in the game, as the saying goes.
I’m sure some of my retail friends will insist that comfort returns are necessary to drive their business. But I do have to wonder if we can’t find more positive things to talk about than the negative of a return. Wouldn’t it be great if we could really sell the benefits of mattresses, rather than the ease with which consumers can exchange them?
One step retailers can take right away to deal with this problem is to increase their commitment to sales education programs. Producers always are eager to help with sales training. Retailers need to take advantage of those opportunities and raise the professionalism of their sales associates.
By the way, if you don’t like this column, return it to me anytime in the next three months and I’ll send you a more comfortable one — free.
JB commented:
First of all I understand that improper use of a sleep trial can become very costly to a retailer.I have been the Sales Manager for a large retail furniture store for 8 years.
In struggling with the comfort return dilema and how to reduce them, we actually increased the amount of time that a customer had for a comfort return from 30 days to a number significantly higher.
Our reasoning was that with the 30 day period the customer started getting anxious by the 2nd week and that they were not giving the mattress enough time for the suface to soften properly, or their bodies enough time to get acclimated to a new sleep surface. (please read all of the way through to follow the reasoning and results).
The end result was that our comfort returns went down to vitually nothing. Overall approximately 2% of our overall volume came back as a sleep trial. Now that may seen even a little high, but if we even had a customer swap a high profile foundation for a low profile foundation, the whole sale was counted as a comfort return. And I can tell you that this was the majority of the 2%. Actual comfort returns were probably closer to 1/2 to 1%.
Again, our reasoning behind extending this return period was simply that 30 days gave the customer an unrealistic expectation of how long it would take to acclimate to a new sleep surface. In your article you mentioned that a customer should know within a couple of days if a set was right for them. I found first hand that this is untrue. The saying goes that a person takes 21-30 days to make or break a habit right? A customers body has become habitiulized to an improper sleep surface over the past how many years, and you expect them to adjust to a new sleep surface overnight?
In offering this extended trial period we did a few things that any "professional" salesperson should do.
1.)In offering the extended sleep trial we also insisted that the customer kept the sleep set for a minimum of 60 days- anything under this required Sales
Philip Slobodien commented:
David,
Keep it up, all your columns are just what the bedding mfg and retailers need to hear!
Philip Slobodien
Serta,NY, Spring Air, North Arlington NJ (Retried)
David Perry commented:
Thanks to my posters on this column. See the posts on the follow-up column that I wrote. They make some great points, too.
-David Perry
Stanley Porter commented:
I WONDER WHAT THE MANUFACTURERS DO WITH THE RETURNS.I WOULD ASK THE S COMPANYS THAT QUESTION,AND MAYBE SOME OF THE SMALLER AND MID-SIZED MFG WHAT THEY DO.I WONDER HOW HONESTLY THIS QUESTION WILL BE ANSWERED.
