Marks & Spencer's in Garuda Mall. Review on Garuda Mall, Bangalore

Please note that this review is about the Mark's & Spencer's store in Garuda Mall, and not on Garuda Mall as a whole. I would like to share an expereince in this store which brought out the low quality of service which it is meting out to it's customers while charging high prices. While the prices are quite high (for example a men's shirt costs around 3,000 bucks), the standard of service just does not meet up to what you expect for a store charging such high prices.

There was an instance that a colleague of mine went to this store to buy a shirt, and a few other things too. She tried the shirt on, liked it, and proceeded to bill it. It was about 2,500 or 2,800, I'm not too sure. At the moment when she signed the credit card bill, she noticed that there was a loose thread on one of the buttons. Since it was quite an expensive shirt, you would understand that she wanted it without any defects like this. So she asked the salesman to change it, but the guy refused saying that it was the only piece they had in her size. So now she said, OK, she would exchange it for something else, in the same price range. I expected the salesman to agree, but to my surprise he flatly refused, pointing at a sign that said somethign to the effect of ''Goods once sold will not be exchanged''. He said that a sale was going on, so the store had this no-exchange policy. But the point was, that the shirt my colleague had bought was NOT on sale!! Still they refused to exchange it, even when she reasoned with them that she had not actually carried the merchandise out of the store. The least they could have done was offered to repair it and sew the loose button properly, but even this they did not do!

Frankly speaking I was quite upset at this episode. I have been to stores of various foreign brands, Adidas, Levis, Nike... all of them exchange clothes/shoes if you find a defect. I once bought a Nike jacket from Sports Station (Brigade Road) and a day later found that the zip of one of the pockets was not opening. They took it back and gave me a new jacket without any fuss. Now Marks & Spencer's is charging almost double for more or less the same clothes that you get in other brand's shops, so the least they could have done, is have more customer friendly policies in place.

I would really advise anyone planning to shop here to take your money elsewhere. These guys are just not worth it. The quality of the clothes are just the same you get elsewhere (probably worse, since other stores dont sell shirts for 2,500 with loose threads on the buttons), but you end up paying much more, and to top it off, they are not customer friendly.