May 12, 2008 12:10 PM
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I visited D-Mart near Seawoods at Nerul, Navi Mumbai this past weekend (Sun 12 May 08), with my parents. It was the first time we had been there for weekend shopping (groceries etc) and the experience has made us resolve never to go there again.
PARKING: There's no parking space owned by the store, so you'll have to find some parking space for yourself on the road-side near the building. (No issues with that, it happens at a lot of places and I'm used to it.)
SECURITY: I was less than impressed with the security staff, to begin with... first they never checked my mom's handbag at the entrance, neither did they show any objection to bringing it into the store, and then after we had spent at least 20 minutes and been to almost every section in the store, one of their staff came up to us and said something about handbags not being allowed! Eventually they gave us a bag to put the handbag in... this could have been done right at the entrance... was the guard there asleep, or just not trained as to this matter?
LAYOUT & SECTIONS: The store layout was a little confusing and it was quite surprising to find certain items appearing at various places in the store. We were shocked to see that certain well-known and well-selling brands (which we buy often from other stores) were missing from the shelves. Also, items for sale in these shelves were obviously not being maintained properly and regularly. I saw a large bucket-ful of yellow squeeze-balls with smilies on them, most of which looked like they had been chewed out, by what or whom I would not like to imagine.
Staff & Service: There were hardly any people around to help with the merchandise. Given that it was a Sunday and there was bound to be a lot of customers coming in, I got the feeling that this store was rather understaffed. We had some questions to ask about certain products in the crockery section, but it took us a few minutes to find someone who could help (had to look around)... and eventually could not help us much, anyway.
CHECKOUT SECTION: The worst part came when it was time to check-out. We had bought a cart-full of groceries and other items, and found that around 3-4 of the 10 counters were non-functional. We got in line for one of these, upon which one of the staff members requested us to get into another line for counter 10. We assumed this was a nice gesture to help us out... next thing we know, we've joined the line and almost at counter 10, and the counter shuts down for some reason. The man just moved out without any explanation to the customers standing in the line!!! So we're finally back in the original line we had joined, set back by quite a few places of course... and we saw the girl at the counter is just standing there, doing nothing. My dad went up and asked her if there was something wrong with the system, upon which there was stony silence. It was the customer at the counter who answered us instead, saying his credit card swipe was not getting through. Dad wondered aloud if the staff are not allowed to speak, upon which, finally a few inconsequential words were forthcoming from the poor girl. We changed our line YET AGAIN, and saw a few bottles of fruit squash with discounted prices, which we decided to pick up.
The price of "Litchi Crush" was very clearly displayed as Rs. 75 per bottle. As the counter staff girl (a different one) took the items through the bar-code reader, we noticed that bottle being billed as Rs. 82 instead. We brought this to her notice, and I pointed out the price being displayed right in front of the counter !!! Not a great response.. the girl just stared at the display in front of her... finally her superior popped up from somewhere and eventually informed us that the price cannot be manually modified & entered into the system. We had no choice but to either buy it at Rs. 82 or to discard that item (which we discarded of course), and I was getting thoroughly disgusted with these guys at this point. Every retail store that I have visited, has a manual entry over-ride for changing item prices at billing, and it was clear that these people did not want to sell the item at the discount that they were offering. Very unwise of them! I was left wondering how there were so many customers frequenting this store... have they not seen better service at other retail outlets?
Final Comments: It's quite obvious that the staff at this store is highly UN-trained, quite UN-inspired and evidently very UN-happy with their own work. I cannot recommend this store to anyone I know.
