to take a gift back to a shop it wasn't bought from?

[Mmmcoffee]

My DD got a lovely boxed activity set for Christmas - but she already had the same thing for her birthday last year. The same company makes a range of different activity sets.

I have no idea where it was bought from, and don't want to tell the original giver that she doesn't want it, so I went into a local shop and asked if they would exchange it for one of the other sets.

They said yes, not a problem, and followed with "... it was bought here, wasn't it?"

Well of course i said yes, though I went a bit red! And now I'm going to take it back but I feel a bit horrible about it, like I'm being fraudulent (which I suppose I am). But really, it's an exchange and the shop can still sell 'my' item for the same price.

So why do I feel so guilty!

it is the same thing. if you bought a tin of HEINZ baked beans from tesco, you would not take them back to asda and ask for a refund. yes, asda do also sell heinz baked beans, and yes, they could plonk said tin back on the shelf and it would sell.

but things like that can bugger up stock taking, particularly for small businesses, which i would imagine the local shop the op is taking it back to is.

(sorry, can you tell i'm stressed!, am a small business in the middle of doing my accounts!)

Lucykate, not meaning to be absurdly hair-splitting, but surely a refund would bugger things up far more than a swap of equal value in a popular line? In my head it's quite a different issue and I would draw the line at asking for the actual refund...

Don't envy you the accounting task!

for a small business, a swap could cause issues,

rep from toy company "how come you have one more of that product, and one less of that product accounted for?"

shop owner "err, i don't actually know"

i know it's by no means a biggy, i'm just speaking from the point of view of someone who runs a small business, and who's husband had to re-do all his accounts one year because his figures were 1p out, and for the inland revenue, that 1p had to be traced!

funny how when you've overpaid, they're not quite so hot on the case to return the money!

I would have done it in a big chain store, but not in a small owner run shop.

I have just charity shopped 3 unwanted christmas presents this morning. To be fair, none of them were our christmas presents, they were christmas presents given to my SIL, my stepfather and my FIL by other people. None of them wanted their presents and gave them to us instead and I didn't want them either so I charity shopped them!

If the small shop has sold any of this popular item recently, then how do they know it's not one of those being swapped? It's not as if the OP is planning on going into the shop and sneakily switching it with one on the shelf. It'll all be accounted for.

Ah, good point, Trillian.

barcodes. each product has it's own barcode scanned by the till.

Does the barcode identify each individual item though, or just the type of item? As in, does it sy 'this is book x' or 'this is copy number 903,890 of book x'?

I personally would ask the giver where she/he bought it from and explain the situation so that you can exchange it for something else. Better to be honest really!

After all this, I think I'm going to take the easier option - DD got a couple of gift cards for ToysRUs, so when we make a special trip to spend them I'll take the box with me and see if I can swap it there.

I hadn't considered that it might bugger up the stocktaking in a small shop.

Somehow it bothers me less to do it at a big chainstore. Especially if we're buying other things at the same time.

YABU. But you could ask the manufacturer if they would mind swapping it for another one.