My partner and I had a 2.30pm appointment at Halfords on Seafield Road in Edinburgh for a trade-in review of my bike. We were in the market for buying two battery-powered bikes.We arrived before the appointment time and waited at the front desk, where we were not acknowledged by the young man. He was on the phone, but didn't even look up to indicate that he would be with us shortly. We gave up waiting, and my partner carried my bike up the steep steps to the bike area. There were two youngsters behind the desk there, and both of them ignored us. One young woman was fixing a bike, and the young man was on the phone. We waited quite some time to be acknowledged. Eventually, the youngster on the phone, kept the phone to his ear and asked what we wanted. My partner stated that we were there for a 2.30pm bike review appointment. He spoke to the girl fixing the bike, who said that she would be a while finishing what she was doing.The boy said to my partner "do you want to bring the bike upstairs?" (while he still had the phone to his ear)....it should be noted at this point that my partner is nearly 70 years old, but thankfully had managed to bring the bike up the stairs. Any service person worth their salt would have offered to go and collect the bike from downstairs on seeing the age of the person he was speaking to. It was quite a shocking way to speak to an older person. He then stated that we should come back in an hour! I said we had booked the appointment at 2.30pm, and it doesn't take an hour to review a bike for trade-in, especially when it was quite clear it is an almost brand-new bike - which I actually purchased from Halfords. He said that we had to wait until the girl fixing the bike was available, and I said that this was not what we had booked. We booked a specific time, not a 'get around to it whenever you are ready' time. He stated that this was the best he could do. We left, and will never be back in a Halfords. That day, we had a second non-bike-related appointment in West Lothian. We had come from East Lothian for the appointment, and it subsequently took us an extra hour of traffic and driving to get to West Lothian, because we had to drive through the city centre. This was an enormous waste of our time, given that we could have driven round the Edinburgh city bypass instead, had we not had to waste our time stopping at Halfords, where the servers were entirely uninterested in sticking to our booked appointment. Clearly the shop is being run by youngsters who haven’t been trained in manners and customer service. Halfords lost a sale of many thousands of pounds for two battery-powered bikes. Finally, the complaints procedure at Halfords leaves a lot to be desired. A simple email address on the website would suffice. Instead, I went round in circles being told by the live chat person that I could not email the complaints department myself, because they don't monitor their emails, but somehow, if I sent the complaint to the live chat person, he/she would forward it to the complaints department, and they would read his/her email, but they wouldn't monitor the inbox with my email! I imagine this is a procedure used in order to avoid complaints, and to make it so difficult for people to complain that they give up. That doesn't foster loyal customers. Then the complaints people demanded personal information from me (address, phone number, email address etc), and when I said my address is not required to process a complaint, they rejected the complaint! What kind of company is this?! Don’t go. If you want a bike in Edinburgh, use Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative instead, they’re excellent.
