I used to awe The Face Shop at their awesome products and display concept which portrayed a clean image of skincare products featuring aspiring Korean Star Celebrities, however, this fucked-up shopping experience made me think otherwise...
In The Past:
- The Face Shop sold many cool skincare products range which proved to be efficient yet worth the value for money and their range of products were neither too sticky nor oily for the average skin.
- When you shopped over a certain value, they offered you cute little VIP cards which allowed future shopping discount of 10% (come to think about it, it is really miserable though.) and it came in the form of 2 VIP cards - which allowed any other family member to use the card in their future shopping trips as well....
BUT NOW,
What happened to the cool shop and their sales concept?
To summarize all in short,
The Face Shop is
FUCKED-UP.
Honestly, I could not think of any other better term to summarize it.
Because this is what their present image portrayed!!
Why is it so? I can give a thousand reasons for it...
The Present Face Shop:
- The Face Shop doesn't evolve. Besides the All-Time Favourite products, their other products does not proved to be effective, and their cool innovation is to change their packaging... Yes, they do not launch new products, yet those un-awesome products are re-packaged with other forms of packaging.
- From the minute you stepped into The Face Shop when their staff greeted you, you do not get an awesome shopping experience, but only cold-hard sales tactics which their staff have equipped, trying to push you to buy anything - yes, anything which they promote to you! How fucked up is that? They can approach you one minute and promote anything which they "want" to promote to you and push you to buy, and that is nothing which you needed in the first place! The worst is, yes, you can never shop in peace when you browse their products, because the minute you have any product in hand, instead of explaining anything to you, they start to flaunt their "promotion" tactics...
- How cool is it to stick a scotch-tape on your skin and try out their lovely nail polish? I personally feel it is retarded to stick a tape on my skin to try out any colors which I have set my eyes on?! Yes, that is how retarded their sales assistant approaches you when you browse their nail polish. Is Face Shop so poor they couldn't offer some nail polish remover to you - to remove off any nail polish which you tried on? Well, I guessed that is another of their clever sales tactic to "keep yourself busy" when you choose the nail polish and try-it-yourself when they eye on another "big fish" which can fall for their lousy sales tactics.
- The fucking long queue which you have to endure even when you are only purchasing one product and there are only 3 customers queuing up before you. Oh gosh (you might have exclaimed) because they cannot even serve 3 customers of their purchases despite there are only 3?!!! I cannot imagine what will happen if the staff of Takashimaya did the same when they have so many customers in the queue.... As much of you might have guessed, yup, it all comes down to be their sales assistants flaunting their sales tactics!! Yup, even till the end, when you came down to purchase only what you need, they just cant stop promoting until you leave the store. Because when you are trying to make the purchase, they come to the next stage of "if you purchase this with blah blah blah you will get how many % off and they start to show you how many "cents" yup, just a few 2-3 dollars or cents more you can save when you buy "this" with "that"... Sigh, in short, they just want you to buy lah! - And when you kept rejecting, they just continued to push as if the queue wasn't there, and when you are firm enough to keep your stand, they just "lan lan" and accept your purchase while they tried the sweet approach of apologising to the customer behind in the queue before they start the same round of approach again...
Yes, that is really hideous because you cannot pay in peace as they need to do this "promoting" story-telling for one whole round before you can even try to pay and all you can do is "MUST LISTENING VERY ATTENTIVELY and wait (your precious time will be all gone) before you can get what you wanted.
- Another fucked-up theory is who cares about the so-called membership? Yes, although you get 10% discount when you shop, so what? I don't care for the 10% - if you know mathematics, you can only see big discount off the 10% when you purchase a $100 since 10% is only 10bucks! Meaning to say you need to endure all the crap before you can get the few-cents discount off your product! Yeap, another time-consuming in all. Furthermore, there are never any promotions for members only for The Face Shop. They do not send you brochures / newsletter etc. and I can see that they save quite alot in that. Secondly, they do not even bother to check your member card! That was what happened when I made my purchase and was digging my card holder to look for the fucked up miserably small card which was nowhere to be found. The sales assistant was going on and on while I was digging miserably and finally she noticed, and her reaction was (before I fished out my card) and she saw the small card, she said okay you got discount and she just continued; I just wondered was she dumb and all because she pitied on my rummage for card? - I guessed she was blind because I had so much stuff on hands... What is the point of being a member with zero exclusives and only saving a few cents despite their promoters psycho-ing you to spend more? Pathetic treats for the members and they just give any tom dick harry membership when they have the spending power of more than $150? That's cheapo!
NO member exclusives, poor product knowledge and poor PR skills with lots of bugging and intentional promotion of unwanted products, that is definitely negative no matter in which aspect I have viewed of the shop. 10 thumbs-down is never enough of how the shop and its sales culture reflected, I definitely wouldn't want to patronize again, and seriously, I wondered what is the shop owner thinking when the competition of skincare is so competitively high now in the market? They do not even give any samples but only testers which anybody and everybody tries on the same bottle... Honestly I wonder whether they did the same for the outlets in Korea and how anybody can actually tolerate such hardcore sales...
Apart from the poor shopping experience, I would rather give an average for their products range because you can get almost similarly same products qualities from any brand from Watsons and definitely, you can have the peace of mind to browse them as and when from brand to brand in peace. Besides, shopping at Watsons (with the watsons card) entitles points to be accumulated which can be cash back in future purchases + members special discount, how cool is that? Else, you can browse better skincare range in Takashimaya, Isetan etc whereby honestly, their sales assistants do not bug you as much like this idiots do...
In all, definitely, there wouldn't be another shopping patronage to The Face Shop anymore.
