Can anyone help me on RETURNS in France. Is it just me or can you demand your money back at shops because I always come back with a flipping credit note.
try quoting part of all of or giving them this
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F11094 good luck xxx
If you continue to fight you will normally get your money back for most purchases, with regards to domestic appliances both brown and white goods the prices in Hypermarkets or online seem very attractive the problem is the Service Apres Vente having been a salesman for over ten years in that field with Le-clerc I bought all my products from Darty also I have been pretty lucky which is a surprise in todays 'if it's bust throw it away society' the washing machine has done 12 years (heating element packed up after four due to calcium extended guarantee sorted that one out), tv 8, home cinema 10, dishwasher 12 so in general not too bad....
In general I usually have a store loyalty card and get any refund on that (C4, Le-clerc) far easier as I know I'll shop there again anyway and that covers the whole store. I try to stick to the bigger stores or those that are national as they are far easier to deal with in honesty French consumer law is somewhat a minefield and it is worth looking at each individual stores terms and conditions for returns/refunds so you know what your actual rights are as they do vary somewhat.
Castorama do without hassle. They have one of the best customer services I know.
Carrefour give you your money back too, but shops are under no obligation to do so unfortunately.
Some shops will even go so far as to make you spend your credit note in exactly the same department as the product you returned. So if you returned a chair, you wouldn't be able to buy a plant from the same shop instead. Crazy.
I have had most of my money back from Cdiscount, but that is because they failed to deliver our micro-wave. They rang me up to tell me that they could not provide the model we had chosen and we then paid an extra 18 euros for another model, which they have also failed to deliver. They seem to have no record of our extra 18 euros, although they sent us the paperwork as a receipt for our extra charge.
Cdiscount is fine if things go well, but they have a premium telephone line to actually talk to them and the options they provide on their website do not cover them changing the model and then taking more money. They always showed the original order, which was way back in January, and the altered order never seems to have made its way to the website.
We ordered a dishwasher and fridge-freezer at the same time and these were delivered as they should have been.
Conforama did but we had to haggle over the delivery charge being repaid because their argument as that the freezer might have gone wrong inside 24 hours which is their responsibility BUT they did deliver it after all. We just said that we would go to the mairie for advice, to which the entire sum was repaid in cash. Why that? Well, we happened to look at the blurb with the freezer and found that somebody else had bought it, recorded the date of purchase, receipt number and when they had called the store to say it was a faulty machine. We bought it as new therefore slapped the user manual on the store manager's desk and said we would never use Conforama again. So a credit note was excluded before the delivery charge bit came in. All other things ever returned have been exchanged or against a bon d'achat, sometimes with a little extra thrown in.
Never had my money back anywhere and have always accepted a bon d'achat as that's the way it works, OH couldn't believe it when I said you actually get money back in the UK, don't know if anyone else here has ever received hard cash back, I doubt it but it'll be interesting to see ;-)