About six weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, I randomly decided to visit my local Hallmark. I hadn’t been in awhile. I wanted to check the sales. But when I drove up I saw something I didn’t expect: Going Out Of Business: Everything 30% off.
What was supposed to be a quick trip immediately turned into a long trip as I shopped and weighed the pros and cons of buying at 30% off vs. the sales that I knew would follow.
In the weeks that have followed that Hallmark-ly fateful day, I have visited the store for every price point drop. 40% off. 50% off. 60% off. Each time I’ve gone into the store, shopped, and weighed the pros and cons of buying or waiting.
Not to brag, but I think I’ve done a pretty good job gauging when I’ve needed to buy and when it’s been okay to wait. I went for the rarely-on-sale gift items somewhat quickly but waited for the cards. I currently have enough cards to last for quite awhile. My plan is to make a spreadsheet of the gifts and cards I purchased—some for specific people, some to have ready for the right occasion. My hope is that I’ll actually remember to look at the spreadsheet, send the cards, and give the gifts!
Sadly, my local Hallmark, Peggy’s Hallmark of Lillington, is no longer a Crown Rewards Store. They stopped paying their dues when they decided to close. For those of you who may not know Hallmark-ese, that means that because the store is not a Crown Rewards store, customers have not been getting rewards points for purchases made. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care, but I’ve purchased so much stuff that I should have earned a whole bunch of rewards points…which is where the main point of today’s writing lies.
Because I’ve been to the store so often recently, I’ve become Hallmark-friends with the two workers. We’ve shared funny cards and stories and learned about one another’s families and had a good time bantering back and forth at how dedicated I am in my gift and card buying. Today, after our normal greetings, I told my Hallmark-friends that this would probably be the last time I’d come into the store before it closed because I wouldn’t be free during business hours next week. We were all very saddened that I wouldn’t make the 75% or 80% off sales.
As I started making my Hallmark-pile on what used to be the display shelves at the front, one of the workers told me that I could call 1-800-HALLMARK and have them credit my account for the cards I bought. The trick was keeping the purchase under $100 and knowing exactly how many cards were purchased. We worked together to make this happen—splitting the purchase into two transactions—and then we told each other our Hallmark-goodbyes, realizing that we might not see each other again because the store was closing.
After running some other errands, which may have included going to another Hallmark store to look for Vera Bradley, I stopped by the house before heading to an appointment in Raleigh. When I got home, my mom told me that Hallmark had called. Evidently, one of my Hallmark-friends had charged me too much, realized her error, felt terrible about the overcharge, looked up my name in the local Hallmark-Database, and called my house to tell me to come back by the store so that she could credit back the money.
It was $5.99. $5.99 that I pretty much guarantee I would have never missed. $5.99 that her store could have kept as it was going out of business. $5.99 that seems so small in the scheme of my Hallmark purchases but that now means so much.
In this broken world of broken people where we so often we hear of taking instead of giving, of lying instead of telling the truth, of loopholes instead of integrity, there are still good people trying to bring good to the world…
Thank you, Hallmark-friend, for showing me that today. And rest assured: I will do my best to bring good to the world, too, $5.99- or one card- or gift- at a time.
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