Several weeks ago, I was in a supermarket and purchased a few items. When it came to change, the cashier had no coins. So what does she do? Without apology, she gave me 4 sweets (as a substitute for my 4 shillings). This kind of bartering takes place all the time in this country – some supermarkets even have a sign at the cashier’s point boldly asking customers to accept sweets as there is a shortage of coins. The shopper does not have to wait a long time as coins are being sought. The supermarket swiftly moves on to the next customer. But I thought, hang on a minute. Who is getting the short end of the stick here? I never wanted sweets in the first place. Yet, this is not bad enough when you consider the next set of facts. The following weekend I went back to the same supermarket and looked up the prices of sweets, precisely a packet of 100 sweets, the same brand. Well, it appears a pack of 100 sweets costs 40 shillings, making the unit price about 0.4 shillings. Quite unfairly, the cashier gave me a sweet for a shilling meaning I paid 150% more. So, not only do I have to take the sweets that I never wanted in the first place, but I have to take them at a price that is just scandalous! At a time of deep-recession-economy like this, such is the kind of stuff that makes my blood boil. Heck, the government had to change the way the Central Bureau of Statistics calculates inflation so that the figures can look less scary.
My beloved country is not known for consumer rights protection so I don’t think I will get justice any time soon. My recourse is to shop using Visa debit card (!), even for items of as low as 10 shillings. I think this option makes the supermarket pay a service charge to Visa and that is somewhat gratifying. However, it means I will have to spend some extra 5 minutes waiting as the cashier swipes my card over and over because of time-out errors arising from the fact that the GPRS connection for the PDQs is provided by the CSP which I work for and we are not known for reliable data connections. It is Africa after all, reliable data services equate to a luxury. The other risk is: my card may very well be cloned while I am at it. A friend of mine once swiped his card in Nigeria and later started noticing dodgy transactions on his bank statement. When he mentioned to us that he had recently been to Abuja, suddenly the dots connected.
Let’s think of some of the ways that CSPs also rob customers in exercises that are meant to make the customer’s life easier, or to correct mistakes made by the CSP.
We once had a customer whose data bundle balance was deleted. He noticed and promptly complained. He only noticed because he had been charged out-of-bundle fees and thought this cannot be right. So, he demanded proof of data sessions and volumes and it turned out his suspicions were right. In our wisdom, we refunded the bytes. We also credited back the number of bytes that had been charged out of bundle. Nobody thought about the fact that the important thing was not just the number of out-of-bundle bytes but the per unit rate at which the customer’s account had been charged i.e. his first complaint is that 50MB were deleted thus clearing his data bundle as a result of which he surfed 25MB out of bundle charged at 8 shillings per MB hence accruing a charge of 100 shillings. If he had been surfing within bundle (as he should have), the per unit rate would be 3 shillings. Quite elementary, you would think. Giving him back 75MB is simply not justice. Perhaps somebody thought the customer wouldn’t notice.
But notice he did. And complained to high-heavens, story was all over the dailies. We were “saved” by the same thing that I am now complaining about – my country is not known for consumer rights protection.
Eventually, we did refund correctly. But the customer’s faith in us, if he ever had any, was gone. Can a refund ever make up for the inconvenience?
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