Marsha Farmer, Murdoch’s Clothing Manager in Littleton, Colorado, did some serious detective work to return a lost ornament to its owner.
Okay, here’s a heart-warming true customer service tale for ya!
On Valentine’s Day this year in our Littleton store, Diane, our Boot Specialist, was moving some boots off a shelf.
She happened to look inside a Sorel snow boot; strangely, inside the boot was a child’s handmade Christmas ornament, snugly cushioned like a little bird in a nest. It had a delicate design with small handprints and painted fingers that showed a boy’s name and birth date.
Had to be a lost family treasure, our staff figured. But whose family? And how did it get there? We hadn’t the foggiest. It was a Valentine’s Day mystery.
Our Littleton Clothing Manager, Marsha, and her staff set out to track down the ornament’s owner. But when they looked up the boots for a return, there were no recorded returns for that boot style in Littleton. They dug deeper and discovered they received the boots as a transfer from our store in Clifton – 244 miles away. The boots had been exchanged for a different size by a customer on January 3rd – well over a month before the ornament was discovered.
Marsha checked our records and found contact information. She called the number, but nobody answered. So she left a message asking if someone at that number was “missing an item.” Not 15 minutes later we got a return call from a woman who asked, “Did you find an ornament?”
She was thrilled to hear we had it. It was a special gift from her grandson and she had been looking for it for weeks. She was at a loss as to how she had lost it. It had simply vanished.
Turns out the boots were a gift to a family member. The family lived in Littleton, but was in Clifton for the holidays. Before returning home to Littleton on January 3rd, they stopped at the Clifton Murdoch’s to exchange the boots for a different size.
Marsha tells what happened next:
“We were transferring items around for stock. The boot with the ornament was sent to Littleton and we put it on our shelf to sell. Not one person tried that boot on. So when we started cleaning up the winter boots for the year, that’s when we found it – on Valentine’s Day.”
So, how did the ornament end up in the boot? You can guess. The boots were standing up under the Christmas tree at the woman’s home in Clifton. The ornament fell off a branch and landed inside the boot, where it eventually had a nice, warm ride to Murdoch’s in Littleton.
Marsha says, “We were all amazed. It meant so much. It made our day just as much as it made hers!”
All we can say is, many happy returns to all.
