Companies Behaving Badly

Authors

A much more serious situation than the one I detail below under American Spirit Tobacco was recently raised at Authors Beware of Atlas Books.

 

American Spirit Tobacco

AKA Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, aka Natural American Spirit

Recommend it to your friends! Get your ten dollar gift certificate!  Okay so you get gift certificates to try the product and you get a list that says at the top, "We've noted which stores accept our gift certificates..."

So you get this list of ten to fifteen stores in your area, and you visit several of them and they say, "No we're not taking this."  So what's the deal?  It's very frustrating.

If you call up the Santa Fe Tobacco Company, they will give you a big song and dance that the list is also to you where the cigarettes are.  I don't what to know where the cigarettes are... I want to know where I can use this stupid gift certificate!

It's very frustrating to go to all these cigarette outlets and be turned down.  I really don't feel like taking my time to contact all these places and waste a few hours of my time to try to do what the company themselves could have done at the get-go.  Just send me a list of those places that will accept the gift certificate.  The company representative will also tell you that sometimes, outlets that at first say "no" later say "yes" and it's possibly a way to get them to take the certificate or whatever.  Or that somehow simply telling me which outlets do take it, would delay receiving the gift certificates for an extra month or something.

Santa Fe Natural Tobacco listen closely.  I am not interested at all in your stupid reasons for why you can't simply tell me which stores take the gift certificate.  That is your problem, not mine.  What it sounds like to me, is that you are trying to use consumer-facing pressure to compel these other places to take your certificates.  (I.E. Pissed-off customer in front of store clerk...)  Fix your systems, fix your computers, fix your process.  Don't rely on the consumer to fix it for you, or to market your brand for you, or to do your work for you.