Your Right as a Consumer

I think it is a Malaysian culture to tolerate in so many things. That is a reason why the consumer power is not very strong as in western. It was my friend who made a claim last time about a speaker that he bought and within one day, the customer service arrived in-front of the door replacing with a new one. That was the scenario happened in the U.K. But in Malaysia, most of the customer service will asked 1001 questions to confirm the defectiveness of the product. Such as "have you turn the switch on?", "Make sure you connect the cable right", yada yada... At the end of the day, we felt frustrated and finally we prefer to solve the problem by ourselves.


So, about my experience yesterday, I went to Giant Hypermart in Senawang. I just don't know why, I felt attracted to this travel set tooth brush. After make a few nano-second of thinking, I made a decision to own one (since I spending most of the time at office, sometimes I might forgot to brush my teeth). It was recorded in my mind the price was RM15-something. It just happened that my eyes were pin-point at the display during the cashier scanned the bar-code and I saw it was RM16-something. WTF... Hey why should I pay more than the displayed price? I contacted the guard on the right channel to make the complain, and the guard asked me to see the supervisor.


After giving a simple explaination, I have to show her the place where I took it and verify that it was their mistakes. I was given RM1 refund and the supervisor just innocently move away. It was not a big deal isn't it? What can we do anyway with RM1 in today's world? If you are thinking in this way, then you are wrong... When I was a QA in my previous company, our senior manager told us the company is like a ship, sailing through out an ocean. Customer complain will act like a bomb and if there are too many of it, will cause the ship to be drown and finally all of the sailor will be jobless. Maybe malay people are too kind to put a bomb on a sailing ship?
Even if it involves 10c, we should gather to build the consumer power here in Malaysia. We put on the bomb not to jeopardize the company, instead to make their service better and will benefit us as a consumer in the end.