A Shoppers Drug Mart customer says the perfume she purchased in Etobicoke was counterfeit
She came for J’adore but left with Joane
An Etobicoke woman who splurged on what she believed to be designer perfume was shocked to discover a counterfeit product inside a sealed box from Shoppers Drug Mart.
Ashley Vien had set out to purchase a bottle of Dior perfume for her grandmother, she told the Toronto Star. “My grandmother is 75, she wants to get back into the dating world,” Vien said. “She asked me to buy her this specific perfume she liked. She gave me the cash, and I used my Optimum points for a discount.”
After spending nearly $200, even with the Optimum points deducted, Vien gave the perfume to her grandmother. To their horror, they discovered that the bottle inside was not what they thought they were buying.
“It was a completely different, really awful knock-off of a perfume. It said ‘Joane’ on it, not J’adore,” said Vien. “The packaging looked real, sealed and everything, but the bottle inside was a fake.”
When she took the bottle back to the store, she said, they referred her to customer service. After she provided photos and her receipt, Shoppers told her to contact Dior.
She only received a refund after the Star contacted the Loblaw company, which owns Shoppers Drug Mart, for comment.
A Loblaw spokesperson told the Star that it was an isolated incident, but that “if similar situations arise, we will review each case individually and work to make it right.”
It’s still unclear how the bottle of ‘Joane’ ended up in a sealed Dior box. In a Reddit thread about the incident, several users claimed to have had similar experiences purchasing counterfeit cosmetic products at various Shoppers Drug Mart locations, though those reports are unconfirmed.
Related: Someone who works for the city stole $18,800 worth of merchandise
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
