A 32-year-old woman is seeking compensation from Lane Crawford after she said she was locked in a VIP room at the luxury department store while staff looked into her request to authenticate a HK$17,900 bag she had bought there.
Dion Leung Wai-yin says she now distrusts the upmarket retailer, which gave her a refund and apologised for its 'shortfalls' in the matter. She is seeking HK$50,000, along with two Chanel handbags, to compensate for the distress she says she suffered.
The store has also offered Leung a HK$10,000 gift voucher, which she has refused, saying she will not shop there again.
Leung said that on March 4 she bought what appeared to be a Chanel bag at Lane Crawford in Tsim Sha Tsui but found it had defects. A Chanel shop in Causeway Bay refused to repair the bag, so she returned to Lane Crawford two days later to ask why Chanel would not fix it.
'I was locked in a VIP room, [an employee] served me hot chocolate and he started to chit-chat with me,' Leung said. 'When I asked him when were we going to discuss the bag, he tried to [talk] about his divorce, the size of his feet, and where he came from.'
Leung did not tell staff at the time, but she said she suffered from depression and anxiety that was aggravated by being in the room. She also said shop staff denied her request to have her sister present in the room.