There is supposed to be an 'Open Door Policy' page readily accessible to you, with numbers all the way up to the Regional VP of HR. Ours is on the GM's door.

Do you know what region you happen to be in? Do you have any ins with any of the supervisors, or anyone that could pull you a contact list off of Store Documentation? If you have access to email, or can talk to someone who does, all contact numbers are pretty readily accessible.

Good luck.

i think that if your manager isnt responsive, go over his head to the dm and/or hr. if they dont respond - and i think you should try them maybe 3 times apiece, and be prepared to wait for a response - within a reasonable period of time, go over THEIR heads...and document all this as you go (who you spoke to, their name/position, phone number, etc.).

Just curious.

What was the problem?

This would be dealt with by customer care not the Borders hierarchy.

Sorry, John, but I don't think the manager was necessarily at fault in this situation, although s/he should have explained to you what type of purchase is eligible for tax exemption and what is not and what Borders policy is for such purchases. In my store, whether or not you're entitled to tax exempt status is not customarily mentioned or asked when you don't use a Borders corporate/institutional discount card which has tax exemption programmed into the card's coding as the store must have a copy of your school's tax exempt certificate on file. You may not be aware that the fact that you used your personal credit card would have prohibited the cashier from granting you tax exempt status anyway even though you may have presented a Borders teacher discount card. The two cards are entirely separate, and items purchased with the white teacher discount card cannot be given tax exemption, no matter how your school handles such purchasing.

The manager was correct per se that the store had no way to know when you used a personal credit card (perhaps with the regular teacher discount card) that your purchase was entitled to be purchased under tax exempt status, as you might have been purchasing these books for resale to students which definitely would not entitle you to buy them tax exempt. I've been directed that we can only accept an institutional credit card or a check cut by the institution for tax exempt purchases, absolutely no cash or other form of personal payment of any sort.

I taught in a public high school for almost 20 years and would never EVER have been able to pay for a purchase of this magnitude with my personal credit card unless I didn't mind paying for it out of my own pocket without reimbursement. I'm very much surprised that your school permits this, although I don't know anything about its purchasing procedures obviously.

If no one mentioned the corporate discount card to you, someone should have, particularly when you ordered or got to the register with that many copies and presumably mentioned that you were a teacher wanting them for classroom use. If you said nothing about these being used in a school until after you realized you'd not gotten them tax exempted, then the store can hardly be considered to be at fault. I had a customer challenge me once because she was paying for items for use in her classroom with an NEA credit card and assumed that because she was an NEA member, every purchase she made for her classroom would be tax exempt. Nope, not the case.

I understand that there are state laws that supercede Border's store policy, but my beef was with the way it was communicated and handled. I called and spoke with their special orders person and specifically spelled out EXACTLY what I was going to do three on separate occasions during our conversation. Not once did she balk at the notion of my using a personal credit card. And on each occasion I was told that I would receive tax-exempt. I'd have used a school PO, but since our school moves at glacial speed, the school year would have been over by the time the PO had been processed. This is a common practice for the teachers that I work with. It would be one thing if I was attempting to pull one over on Border, but that is far from the case. In the end, though, all worked out as it should have and I was given my taxes back by Borders and I will be recieving a reimbursement check from school before my account is due.