Yesterday, I shared a few tales of my experiences as a collector working for Unimart/Rent City in Denver. Today, I'll begin with a TALL tale.
We received a call from someone who had moved into a house and found one of our TVs had been left behind. (Our store name and phone number is written on every appliance and electronic merchandise.) A driver and I went over there to get the TV. A woman was at the house, but said we were going to have to wait until her husband got home. She was told not to let anyone in the house. We tried to get on the walkie-talkie to communicate this, but the battery was dead. The driver knocked on the door. He asked the woman if we could use her phone to call the office and let them know what was going on. While he was talking to her, he wormed his way into the house and started using the phone. The woman was rather meek and was trying to get him off the phone, but never spoke loudly enough for him to hear her. We asked what time her husband was supposed to get back. She said it would be an hour later.
We left and came back. Hild said he would meet us over there. We got there first and knocked on the door. Then this guy came out. I am not kidding, HE WAS SEVEN FEET TALL! AND HE WAS ANGRY! (Every negative stereotype you've heard about men with double-Y chromosomes? That was this guy!) He started yelling at us for coming over, forcing ourselves inside, helping ourselves to the phone and threatening his family. (What did his wife tell him?) It was clear he wanted to kick our butts, and he wouldn't have had to lift his leg very high to do that. We both just backed up. Then, Hild arrived, jumped out of the van and tried to calm him down. The man was yelling that he didn't owe us any money. Hild told him that was right, we just needed to get the TV. They still wouldn't let us in the house. The man and his wife got the TV and brought it outside. This was supposed to be a simple pick up, so I don't know how things just kept going downhill.
Another so-called "simple pick up" involved me going over to this woman's house. We had a board that listed all the pick ups we needed to do that day. There was one that said that we needed to retrieve a stereo from this one home. I figured I could do that myself, so I grabbed the van keys and headed out. I got to the house. The woman let me in, but she didn't seem too happy. I got the stereo and wrote her a receipt for it. She asked me, "Aren't you going to take the other stuff?" She was talking about all the electronic equipment on this large shelf, including a 26" TV and the shelf. I said, "I thought it was only the stereo." "No! It's everything!" So I had to take it all apart and put it in the van, and she just kept getting more mad the longer it took. I was upset at whoever wrote that on the board. That job needed two people.
Even though I made my supervisors mad when I would give breaks to the customers, every once in a while, they would screw up big time. If we needed to get our merchandise back, we usually have to catch the customer at home. Sometimes, we would find an apartment manager who had been getting stiffed by the same guy who'd been delinquent in paying us, and he would be very co-operative in letting us into the customer's apartment. This one guy came home as we were getting the last of his stuff in the truck. He said, "Don't do that! I can pay you right now!" "Okay, give us the money right now." "I don't have the money on me, but I can get it." "We can't wait. Come to the store tomorrow with the payment." Hild said that guy was probably going to sit there in his empty apartment that night and think about not being late on his payments again. The next day, the customer came in, paid at the front desk, and we took his stuff back out. A few days later, I found out that after everything we had been through the day before, THEY LET HIM PAY WITH A CHECK! It was actually a check from his mother and IT HAD BOUNCED! (And I don’t even think his mother wrote it!) We ran back out there because we knew the apartment manager would let us back in, but he told us the guy left a few days earlier and hadn’t paid him, either.
The problems I had with Unimart/Rent City didn't always have to do with collections. Deliveries could turn into adventures as well. I can't tell you how many times we brought furniture to someone's apartment and found it next to impossible to get it through all the stairs, hallways, doors and corners. There were times when we figured out that there was no way we could get the merchandise inside and we had to refund the money. There was one time we cracked the window of a neighboring apartment trying to get a couch up the stairs. Fortunately, that person wasn't at home and we finished that delivery before they got back. However, there was one apartment building that had these nice wide returns on the staircase between floors. That meant we didn't have to stand the couch on its end and slowly work it up. We were able to simply walk and carry it all the way upstairs. I think the architect who designed that building had delivered furniture before.
We also had one woman who rented a washer and a dryer. We got to the house and found out that while she had the hookups for the washing machine, she had no 220 volt outlet for the dryer. She said, "Oh, but I have an adapter!" and handed us a three-prong adapter for a two-prong outlet. That wasn't going to work. When we got back to the store, we told the person who wrote up the contract that we couldn't deliver because she didn't have the outlet. "Well I asked her if she had an outlet for one of those plugs that look like a claw and she said she had an adapter." Then the supervisor came out and said, "I heard that conversation and I thought, 'There's no such thing as a 220-volt adapter!" Well, if he heard that, he should have come out of his office and straightened things out before we wasted a trip.
After a big TV ad push, we got a lot of customers who wanted their merchandise that day. We had ten deliveries to make. We were out until 2am making those deliveries. Around 11pm, we called the last three customers to see if we could deliver the next day. No, they all wanted their merchandise that day like we had originally guaranteed. (I don't think the supervisor offered any kind of discount, like a free week or anything. That would have worked.) The worst part about that night was that all of those customers, EVERY SINGLE ONE, wound up defaulting on their first payments and we had to go pick up the merchandise. That meant the night was a complete waste of our time.
Because of that, I got to the point in which I COULDN'T STAND to see new customers come into our store. I just knew that eventually (and probably sooner than later), they were going to wind up on our delinquent list, we were going to have to call them and harrass them and eventually work to get our stuff back. If I was given someone's application to verify, I could always find a reason to turn that person down for credit. Sometimes, I didn't have to look too hard. One woman gave us an application with phone numbers of where she worked, but none of the numbers were correct. I called another guy's employer and they wouldn't even confirm that he worked there. I told the person on the other end that I was going to have to decline his credit application and I would be certain to tell him who wasn't forthcoming with details. They'd have to deal with him the next day. I just hung up the phone after I said that.
And then, there were issues that had nothing to do with customers. Our delivery fleet consisted of two trucks and two vans. They had a lot of mileage on them and were constantly breaking down. It didn't help that if we told Brud that one of them was leaking oil, he'd say to put more oil in it. If we got a flat tire, he'd tell us to fill it with sealant. If we had a battery that kept dying, he would tell us to buy one of those car battery chargers, but he wouldn't buy a new battery. As a last resort, we had to take the vehicles over to be repaired. It seemed like we always had at least one vehicle in the shop at any given time.
I mentioned in an earlier post that we were right in the middle of Welfare Town in Denver. The store and the corporate office were in a pretty tough neighborhood. I was shown areas around the outside of the store where people had tried numerous times to try to break in and steal our merchandise. They never succeeded in getting inside the store, but that didn't keep them from trying to take things outside the store. One day, I was going to make a delivery and I got in one of the vans. The inside smelled like WD-40. I then realized why. Someone had broken the steering column in an attempt to steal the van. It was in such disarray, I couldn't even start it with the key.
One day, we got a report that one of our vans had been recovered by the police a few blocks away. That meant someone had actually stolen it. Brud went on the rampage, demanding to know why we weren't aware that it was missing. We kept trying to tell him that we were so used to our vehicles being in the shop for repairs, we thought it was there. Even with this reasonable explanation, he was still trying to find someone to blame for this.
With all of our antics in trying to collect payments or merchandise from our customers, you would think that those we hounded would never want to do business with us again. But after all the harrassing, the phone calls, the humiliation, many of our customers kept coming back to us to rent more stuff and the manager would keep renting to them.
One morning, we arrived at the store to find that someone had written graffiti on our front door. It said, "All staff are A******S!" Our supervisor looked at it and said, "Well, I've always wondered what we were. Now, I know." But you know what, I'll bet that person still came in to rent from us again. Why? Because they literally had nowhere else to go. We were the lowest pit in Hell and they had to beg to be admitted.
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