"Can’t anyone make an exception just this once?"

So a bit of background, I work as Technical and customer support for a global tech company, though the section I service is just US/Canada. One of the products we sell are scanners, so you can listen to the police/fire/ems dispatch and more.

Important notes:

1. The customer lived in Hawaii. Only USPS ships there for normal prices, unfortunately we do everything with FedEx.

2. We were already doing something for him we normally don’t do.

3. We usually refer them to a 3rd party company that sells what hes looking for, for $45 (not including shipping)

Anyway, I get this caller that one of my other coworkers had right before me. I guess the line dropped, but he calls back and starts asking for an updated SD card that has the updated US/CAN frequency database on it. Now this is an important detail, we don’t usually sell those directly to the customer. We usually refer them to a third party company that also sells our products, but they actually offer the service of selling updated and programmed SD cards.

Unfortunately, my coworker who first got the call had said they’d look into it already for them, so the customer was insisting of getting it from us. Which is fine, a bit of a hassle but no big deal. I told him I’d need to look into the shipping cost and see if we’d be charging for the card itself. I was told that we’d have to charge second day shipping rates since he was located in Hawaii. So that would be $21 for shipping but the card was free, and it would be all updated.

Well I guess that wasn’t good enough, because the guy starts going on about how it was too expensive, and that it’s ridiculous he has to pay extra for shipping to Hawaii, and why cant it just be sent through the regular mail for like $6 or something. And when I try to advise that it’s corporate policy he got mad, yelled it was too expensive and hung up.

Fine, I don’t care. Makes my life easier anyways.

Well 45 minutes later, while I was at lunch he called back and wanted to place the order since the other store that sells the SD card for $45, wanted $75 total for the SD card and Shipping. Yet that still didn’t stop him from complaining to another one of my co-workers who ended up with the call and he kept trying to get the price down.

Long story short, Guy called in hoping to get something that’s normally $45 for free (which we were offering) and get the shipping free or severely reduced as well. We were firm on the shipping. Guy declined, called the other store, was told it was $75, and came back to us since we offered it much cheaper, and still tried to haggle the price down.