Sports Authority can’t do math

Posted on | July 6, 2009 | No Comments

So my wife went and bought some swimming gear to try out in the lap lanes at Lifetime Fitness.  She was an avid swimmer as a kid and would love to do some laps for exercise and relaxation.  She went to Sports Authority and bought a suit, goggles, and a swim cap.  When she gets home she realizes the goggles are huge and the suit has a spot of some sorts on it.  It wasn’t anything serious, but when you pay $40 for a new suit you’d like to not have it look like a hand-me-down.  So prior to our trip to the gym that night we stop by the store to swap out the suit for a new one and a different pair of goggles.

She finds the suit, the exact same suit and the same price, and a pair of goggles that were a dollar cheaper than the first pair.  The trouble begins when we try to exchange them.  You would think exchanging things that were a dollar cheaper than the originals would result in a crisp dollar bill coming back at us.  Not in the high school dropout math of the Sports Authority manager at the time.  My wife used a coupon for $10 off and he was telling us we’d owe about $20 more than originally.  Turns out the cashier returned the suit and goggles and then charged for the goggles on the exchange.  So now we just need to make the suit line up with what we paid minus a dollar to make this work.  Twenty minutes later the manager was getting pissy with me and my wife was about to make someone pay for this.

What I tried to stress to the manager, whose grasp of mathematics was about that of a three year old child’s, was that we’re returning X dollars worth of merchandise and purchasing X-1 dollar worth as such, we should see a dollar credit in the end.  After about twenty minutes total I got him down to only paying an extra dollar.  What’s funny is my wife is very adept at math, she’ll know the total check when we go out to eat within cents or the grocery bill almost exactly doing casual mental gymnastics and even she was lost the manager had screwed it up so bad.

She of course wants to go back and return it all out of spite.  I said it’s not worth your time or energy for two dollars but you can say you won’t shop there anymore.  So going forward, we’ve pledged not to shop at the Sports Authority.  Granted shortly after that we realized we’ll be at the tent sale this spring when they’re giving away snow boards for 80% off.  So going forward we will only shop them if they’re giving massive discounts!  That will show them!

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