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The Very Hardest Questions...
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The Things People Ask Us!
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A Small Selection of the Strange Orders We Get
We transact about 90% of all our business by mail order, and as we have been selling by mail order for almost 40 years, we try very hard to make things idiot-proof. Naturally we are not suggesting that our customers are idiots, quite the reverse in fact, it's just that if somebody gives us instructions or we have a form to fill, we like it to be very easy indeed, otherwise known as a no-brainer, or idiot proof, however...
...Some Folk Beat Our Best Plans
We relate some of the strange errors and omissions we find on customers orders:-
- Australian Silver Krugerrand
We couldn't believe this one! Krugerrands are South African gold coins. Our guess is that this customer wants an Australian silver kookaburra.
- No Address
We get about half a dozen orders every year where the customer has forgotten to include their address, sometimes the address is just plain illegible, in whihc case we write to ask for confirmation of the address before we post valuable goods. We keep a special file for "missing address" orders. Usually people write or telephone after a few weeks or months, and we can match it up with the order.
- Still No Address
Very occasionally we get a "where's my order" letter without an address, so we have two letters without address from the same person. Once, way back in the 1960's we got an address-less order and one or two address-less follow up letters. We only got the customer's address when Exchange & Mart forwarded a complaint from the customer about not receiving their order,
- Which Date?
Because we sell a lot of coins, and people sometimes forget to tell us which date they want, we include a "date" column next to the "description" column on our order forms. Quite a few people put today's date in this column!
- Which Country
Not content with omitting the coins' date, some people forget to tell us which country they want, for example when ordering euro coin sets. We can often work out which they need from the price, but to avoid confusion, we have now included a "country" column. One Dutch customer ordering a 2002 German set, put the current date in the date column, followed by "NL" in the country column, but fortunately put German in the description column.
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Many more of these to follow soon...
We get so many questions, we have created two new pages, Jewellery Questions They Ask Us, and Coin Questions They Ask Us.