The Jessops Retail Fail Saga (part 1 of ?)

Currently writing from a futon in Chicago.  It’s a clear, fresh sunny morning.  The flight over was uneventful, and the team I’m over with (adults and students) are a beautiful bunch. It’s going to be a beautiful week.

And that’s in spite of Jessops.

For anyone that doesn’t know, I like taking pictures. I’m over in Chicago with a team of young poets - this year’s highest scoring team from the London Teenage Poetry SLAM project that I run - and it’s a great opportunity to play with a camera, but more importantly, to document a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a team of 8 young east London poets, many of whom haven’t been to America before.

I sold my Canon 350D to a friend on Friday evening. It was surprisingly easy to part with - it’s been my photographic workhorse for the past few years, and I’ve learned to love it in new ways since I started experimenting with some of my fast Pentax manual lenses in low light (I’m a natural light photographer and rarely if ever use flash). One of the things that made it easy to part with was the plan to upgrade to a Canon 500D. Straight after handing over my 350D, I walked down to New Oxford Street, to Jessops to buy the upgrade. I’ve already got lenses so I just wanted a new body, which Jessops sells for £529 - not the best price, and I could have got it online for cheaper, but I wanted it ready for travel on Saturday, so I was willing to stump up a little extra cash to have it in hand.

And so began the drama. The sales assistant asked for my card. I entered my pin… and the screen on the salespoint returned to a “welcome to Jessops” greeting. No receipt. The assistant suggested that the connection had dropped during the transaction, and that we should try again. Which we did. Same result. We moved to another till. Same result. The assistant suggested waiting a bit, to see what happened when someone else made a purchase, which happened approximately 10 minutes later, with no problems. So we tried again. Pin accepted, out churns a receipt: transaction declined.

What? I’d done a bit of shopping that evening (new battery for my Macbook Pro, some knitwear from Uniqlo) but a quick mental calculation suggested that I should have had more than enough money in my account for the purchase. I wasn’t going to give up on the camera (I had it in my hand!) and something just didn’t seem right, so I called my bank on the spot (thank the lord for telephone banking) to figure out what happened.

Those ‘failed’ transactions? They didn’t fail. Jessops’ till took £1120 from my current account, without producing a receipt or any other record of a successful transaction.

So, to clarify, I was left on Friday evening with a near cleaned out current account, no camera to show for it, no funds in my current account purchase an alternative, and no alternative card on me to pursue the sale elsewhere. Jessops staff said there was nothing they could do: their head office was closed, and their manager was out of the store (they were closing at 7pm). I ended up spending close to an hour in the store between their staff and my bank (not a free call!) and finally had to leave the store with no camera, and no money. Nothing but a promise that the manager would be in on Saturday morning (the day I was flying to Chicago).

We’ll now take a break, before continuing with part 2.