Due to multiple intances of Xmas rip-off merchants, got a little sidetracked from usual “tekneecall” postings. Ayala Spa are one of those cruddy overpriced stalls that pop up in tube and train stations. They sell beauty products, manufactured in Israel, and claim to contain special minerals that are unique to their products. The particular stall I am referencing is in Fulham Broadway. The salesmen employed bullying tactics to sell to a friend of mine, who told me her experience. She bought me a salt scrub (“from the Holyland”) for £20 (I thought the £8 pound one in Boots was overpriced!), and some nail products. The salesmen then made it difficult for her to get her £10 change, insisting he would give her something else for the money. It was only after she expressed genuine worry about spending too much money and was obviously stressed, he relented, and only sold her a £5 product.
To top it all I tried the salt scrub, which is plainly just ordinary table salt, that actually started to disolve in my fingers. Now call me ignorant, but I fail to see how salt from the Dead Sea differs from salt in the North Sea. This is plainly sales bullshit for a product made in “The Holyland”, i.e. Israel. Avoid these sellers – even better take advantage of their free treatment demonstration then tell them where to shove their products.
They have a website – http://www.ayala-spa.com according to side of products. Try it, but for some inexplicable reason the domain does not exist. I also tried http://www.ayalaspa.com, which is a domain purchased but with no hosting. How do these sellers, with no doubt bonafide licences, manage to trade is no suprise, as this country has a very lazy incompetent civil service. I am wondering if they got the idea from the Real Hustle, where they demonstrated a scam of creating very cheap beauty products, and labelled them up in very convincing way, and sold way overpriced. Or maybe this is a more prevalent scam than I realise!
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I had a very similar experience at a tube station in SW London. Since I was in no rush, I allowed the sales woman to show me the wonders of 1) nail kit which included nail buffers, cuticle oils and hand cream, 2) dead sea salt scrub and a few other products. The woman told me that the retail price of the nail kit was 59.99 pounds (showed me a price list to prove it) but being a student, I told her a firm “NO” to which she responded with an attractive student deal which reduced the cost of the kit to 39.99 pounds (20 pounds reduction). Now, anyone with a bit of common sense would at that point be a little suspicious since she had just taken a 1/3 off the retail price… but being a girl and loving bargains I hesitated for a second. Seeing me hesitate, she proceeded to show me her dead sea scrub salt (scrubbed it into my hands, telling me how moisturising it was), peeling face wash and dead sea mask. When asked about the active ingredients in them, she didn’t really have answers. Anyway, remembering that I didn’t have enough cash on me and that the Chip on my debit card was faulty, I said, “sorry, your products are great but I don’t have enough on me to pay you” waving my card at her. To my surprise, she grabbed the card saying “let’s give it a go anyway.” The screen on the pay terminal read “Card Error” and I breathed out a sigh of relief thinking hurrah, I can get away at last! But this wasn’t the last of it. She typed my card number and the expiry date, charged me 39.99 and the sales went through…shock horror!!! I explained to her that I wanted a full refund but she claimed that she didn’t know how to refund (which turned out to be a lie). In the end, after a good 20minutes of negotiating, she gave me a 20 pounds refund and the nail kit… What was worse was that my bf who I was meeting there got so cross on hearing about the pushy sales woman (whom I thought was friendly but pushy) that he took the product back and demanded a full refund. It took a while to sort it out but his assertiveness on the matter helped. What an ordeal… Exhausting and time-consuming, my advice is, the seller is unprofessional and deceiving so do not go near!
Good for you and your bf! Sounds like you had even more hideous experience. Though I always appreciate the fact that salesmen need to sell, there is a step beyond where it becomes intimidation. Regardless of pressures, it is no excuse for people to become dishonest bullies.
We got charged for the Nail Kit in the IDEAL HOME EX, one would have thought that the organisers would have checked all the stands at the show? £ 20.00. body lotion, Cuticle Oil Buffer & board file.
Seems like councils trading standards dont really care about this type of activity – I reported the Fulham Broadway stall to council 2 months ago, and they are still resident.
I was in The Plaza shopping mall on Oxford Circus yesterday and I got accosted by one of these sales girls on my way into WHSmiths. She tried to sell me the nail kit for £20, which I would never pay. So to get away I said “I’ll go into WHSmiths and think about it….” She was pretty pushy and spouted out a lot of crap about it having a 2 yr guarantee, but no one EVER brings it back because it’s so good! I’m so sceptical about buying from random stalls, so I said I wasn’t from London (which is true!) so what could I do if I did have a problem and she said they have stalls all over the world and also a website I could contact – I just checked and as jaffamonkey says, the website doesn’t exist!