Check out the new Gymboree website!!

Looks pretty snazzy to me I usually resist change, and I loved the website the way it was…BUT there’s at least one new feature of the redesign that I think a lot of shoppers will appreciate, and that is size selection!

Now, when you browse a collection or a category,  in the top banner of the items listing is a dropdown for “Shop by <size dropdown list>”. So if you need a specific size, it can save you quite a bit of clicking and guesswork! You can still use the default of browsing by “All Sizes”, if you want to see everything that is available.

Interestingly, even though accessories aren’t sized, they must have tagged them for every available size, since if you do browse by collection and by size, accessories will still appear .

So check it out and feel free to comment on this post with your opinion!

A lot of people have been wondering if they imagined the khaki rollup pants they saw in the Gymboree Popsicle Party sneak peek! If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, this is the clothing item in question:

 The short answer is no, you did not.

Those khaki pants do exist, and are legitimate Gymboree items, despite being completely absent on the Gymboree website. At least a couple of the stores in my area have them in their stockroom! At least they do, until they get around to returning them to corporate, as instructed. There has been no communication to the stores as to why.

And it’s not that they don’t want to sell them to you, they do! Unfortunately the registers won’t allow it. If those pants are scanned, a message pops up on the display saying something that boils down to “we can’t sell this to the customer, tell them we’re sorry and we stand by our quality”. I’ve seen this message pop up before, when I tried to purchase a pair of year-old Gymmies that they had already sold a million of! What changed? The federal rules/guidelines for clothing retailers.

So, while there has been no communication to the stores about those pants, the general opinion is that there must have been something defective or sub-par discovered about them, after they’d already been manufactured and shipped out. The stores did manage to sell a few before the mysterious ban on them occurred, so there are some floating around, but I hope you all didn’t fall in love with them, because it looks highly unlikely you’ll ever get to own a pair.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

There has been a LOT of confusion and anger regarding some new Gymboree store policies that went into effect on 2/28/10, but the one thing that is certain and clear is that the Price Adjustment policy has changed!

Printed on my latest store receipt is the following:

Effective 2/2/8/10 our Price Adjustment policy has changed. See www.gymboree.com for all of our Customer Service Policies.

Gymboree’s official Price Adjustment policy can be seen here. In a nutshell, this is what changed:

Online orders can only receive price adjustments as a result of a change to the price of the item at gymboree.com; store purchases can only receive price adjustments if the price has changed in the store in which the product was originally purchased. Prices may vary store to store. Online orders cannot receive price adjustments in our retail stores.

This means a price adjustment has become more of a PITA to figure out and get Of course, if you used a coupon or redeemed GymBucks, you’re ineligible for a price adjustment anyways (that has always been the case).

The reason for this change? Also effective 2/28/10, stores will now be pricing their reduced price items based on their respective inventory levels. So if Gymboree store A has quantity 50 of a shirt from a reduced price line, whereas Gymboree store B only has 5, store A’s price will be less for the same shirt than at store B, as a way for them to try to get them sold.

At one point in time stores would price-match each other, and gymboree.com would also price-match a store if the store called them because they were out of stock on a needed size, and that is what this new policy is addressing. There will be no more price-matching between stores, or between stores and gymboree.com, whether it’s an already purchased item or a new purchase.

This policy change does NOT affect exchanges or returns with a receipt!

The official Gymboree Store Return Policy information can be found here. All items of the Return Policy state “for the price paid“. So if you have your original receipt or a gift receipt, it does not matter what store you go to to do the return, or what that store’s current selling price for that item(s) is

It is also not against the current policy to return an item purchased at a different Gymboree store. If you don’t  have your receipt, you simply have to live with getting a merchandise credit for whatever the current selling price is at the store you are doing the return at. Some stores don’t like to do returns from another store (or even any returns in general!) since returned items generally sell for less than the returned price, so it can affect their sales numbers, but that’s just seriously bad customer service on the part of any Sales Associate or Manager who expresses anything other than the customary Gymboree cheerful friendliness to help you with your transaction, whether it’s a purchase, exchange or return!

Hope this has helped to clarify things for all of you!