Bad experience today at Petsmart

The other day I received an email from Petsmart’s Petperks offer with coupons inside. Today I actually checked them out and printed them off to use in their retail store.

Just to backtrack a little, I have been thinking about adopting a kitty from one of those rescue shelters and have been slowly buying my cat supplies while I search for the perfect kitty for me. I’ve already gotten 2 litter boxes from biddycat.com which I will review in a separate post once I actually get around to using it, litter scoop, bowls, cat bed, a few cans of wellness food for starters, and a cat tree. I also picked up one of those pedi-paws so it will be interesting to see how that works out for me and my future kitty.

When I saw those petsmart coupons for such a great deal for this weekend only, I thought I would go and pick up the rest of the supplies I would need which include the litter, a pet carrier, some feathered toys, toy mice, and balls, a brush or two for grooming, maybe a collar and possibly some cat grass and catnip!

I really didn’t need to buy the rest of the stuff right this moment and could have waited til I found the cat first. But $15 bucks off of $50 is a decent savings, considering I have already spent close to $300 bucks so far on cat stuff and will probably cost me another $150-$200 for the cat adoption fee and first vet visit.

Ok, maybe I go all out sometimes (most of the time) when I do things but I like to get things right the first time around or as right as possible. I’ve been doing lots of cat research and have been online being obsessed with looking for my cat and learning how to take care of them. I’ve been reading up on raw feeding and am leaning towards feeding my new kitty a prey model diet as the way nature intended. :good:

So let’s get back to my awful experience today. With coupons in purse and shopping cart in my hands, I picked up most of the stuff I wanted to total to about $50 bucks. I headed to the register as it was about a half hour til closing time and proceeded to pay for my stuff with coupons, petperks card, and my credit card.

The cashier tells me in a not so nice way that my coupons are fakes and they are not accepting them at all. So I told her that I got these sent to me in email by petsmart….what do you mean they are fake? :faint:

She then proceeded to say in a loud manner with all these other customers in line behind me how they’ve been warned that the coupons are fraudulent and their store will not accept fake coupons. At this point, some other worker who seemed like the closing manager comes over to say the same thing, telling me that the email I received was not from Petsmart and that I was fooled and how I shouldn’t click any link within the email because they are fraud.

I started telling them that the email looked really authentic and it said to click for printable version which took me to a link on a site at petsmart-mail.com which apparently is owned by Petsmart and is what they use to send out their petperks offers/newsletters.

Needless to say I was embarrassed by this whole thing as I was not out to use fake coupons. All I did was print off what appeared to me as real coupons from their company to use in their retail stores for this weekend only. I ended up not buying a thing as I am not in desperate need for those things yet and was only buying them now to take advantage of THEIR coupons.

The whole thing didn’t sit right with me on the drive home empty handed and when I got home, I started doing some research on the legitimacy of the email and these coupons. Here’s what I discovered:

1. The email header is sent from petsmart-mail.com and it looks like it was sent from a generic address by them for probably their mass mailings….but I know that emails can be spoofed.
2. petsmart-mail.com appears to be owned by petsmart according to their domain registration information. That info I know can be faked to a certain extent. What is peculiar is that the registration year was 2004 and not a recent registration which in most of these cases are a sure sign of potential fraud.
3. sign up subscribe page at petsmart.com say to add petsmart-mail.com to your email address list (white listing) so that further confirms the legitimacy of petsmart owning petsmart-mail.com
4. the output url directed for printer friendly coupons go to a page residing at petsmart-mail.com so if petsmart owns petsmart-mail.com why wouldn’t a page on their site with coupons be honored by their retail stores?

It took me a few hours of ranting and chasing down info to come up with mostly positive conclusion that these coupons are legitimate. It’s not like they are half off or expires 3 months from now. They are reasonable discounts for a very short limited time of just this weekend.

I just did not appreciate the way I was treated in that store and if I can help it, I probably wouldn’t shop in that particular store again. There’s another petsmart on the other side of town and there’s a petco down the road too.

Every time I go into that store, Petsmart in Glen Burnie off of Ordnance Rd, I try to check out that cats up for adoption but they are really strict about it, saying I would need to fill out an adoption application just to be able to go inside and look at the cats. I’ve gone into other petsmarts that are happy to let people inside to give the cats some attention!! And never have I been in there looking through the glass at the cats has someone come up to me to ask me if I needed help. I seriously would stand there peeking through the glass for a good 5 minutes and no one will approach me or bother to even walk by. There’s been two times the workers had been inside the adoption area and did not come out to offer assistance…and the people who volunteer to clean the cages and feed the cats never offer any help either. It’s like they just want the cats on display but not adopted. With the way the pet population is multiplying and cats being in desperate need for homes to go to, one would think they’d take more time and initiative to move things along.

There is one store that I have driven to a few times that’s a good 25-30 minutes away and they are the best store I’ve been into. The Petsmart in Columbia, MD has staff that is attentive and pleasant. They even have a pet hotel at that location! They always say to go ahead and see the kitties….and the girls that work there tell me their turn around is really good on the cats, meaning they adopt out a lot more cats than any other petsmart in the area. I really believe that’s due to customers being able to freely interact with the cats instead of having them behind sound proof thick glass about 5 feet away. You can look but you can’t touch

The more I think about it, the more irritated I am that they didn’t accept their own coupons. It really seems like they are legitimate and I have printed off all the papers showing the url and my email. I think I may go back and talk to another manager there tomorrow. I have already sent an email via their website to someone, I have no idea who actually reads those emails.

Now it’s the principle, not just about a savings. They basically said to me and everyone within earshot that I was trying to use fake coupons as if I was some scam artist. And if I wasn’t trying to defraud them, then I was a fool for not knowing the difference between a legitimate email and the one I got which by my research seems pretty legit.

I’ll try my coupons again tomorrow as I want to go to the spca to look at a cat in the afternoon and want to at least have my pet carrier just in case I find a match.

I mean, it’s not really about being a cheapskate or looking for a deal. People who know me know that I can be extravagant and generous. I pay full price on tons of stuff and it is what it is. I just don’t find integrity in a company who will give me coupons to use and then say, oh we’re not going to let you use them afterall.

I am however kind of proud of myself for not buying any of the stuff in the cart. I think in the past, I would probably just went ahead and pay for all the items at full retail price just to save face from embarrassment. I think most people would…or they would raise hell or walk off. I stayed relatively calm and I put all the crap back in the right places in the aisles probably because I somehow felt it was my fault. That part is not as progressive as I’d like to be but I take what I can get, my little win is that I didn’t cave and just bought the stuff. If I were to buy it at normal price, I wouldn’t have picked out some of the toys I did just to hit the $50 mark to use the coupon.