Originally Posted by Hyacinth 
Many authentic purses especially in solid color leather DO HAVE CC LININGS. Wherever you're getting your information, it's WRONG.
This is something most people find hard to understand, but Coach employees including sales assistants have NO training about the history and development of the product they're selling. One common response most of us experienced with Coach will give to anyone who asks if they should take a disputed bag to a Coach store to be authenticated is that a Coach employee is the WORST possible person to ask. Most of the responders in this thread know more than a storeful of Coach employees because we've actually studied the bags and their history. A Coach employee may have 3 month's experience and barely know about the features of the bags in their current inventory - asking them about bags going back 20, 10 or even 5 years will almost never result in an accurate answer. Just like the question about the C lining - current bags including the all-leather ones may have solid color linings RIGHT NOW but that wasn't the case 4 or 5 years ago. And full-price store employees know absolutely NOTHING about styles made for the outlet (and vice versa!) - in fact, style numbers of outlet-only bags and other items aren't even in the full-price stores computers!
The comments from the person you talked to are just more proof, although I'd bet that if you searched this forum for the words "Coach employee" to research the kind of experience others have had, you'd find that just in the area of supposedly confirming or denying authenticity, store employees have been wrong at least 90 percent of the time. Phone employees such as Customer Service reps are even worse, if you can imagine that.
Just because someone works for a company doesn't make them an expert. They get no training and have no access to the most basic kind of information like the kind the posters in this and other forums share with other posters on a daily basis - most store employees don't even understand how to analyze a serial number or what the codes in the first half of the number signify. To become an expert, you have to work at it, it's not something you absorb just by punching a time card.
Just to use a simple example - at last count, I have probably close to 100 Coach catalogs, either actual or on cd, and a library of at least 50,000 photos of Coaches, real and fake. Add maybe 50 MB of text files that include information about Coach history, design details, and facts I've gathered from at least 6 years of analyzing Coach products. And that's just the low end of the scale - posters like BeenBurned and Noshoepolish probably have at least 5 times the saved information in their own files as I do. If you can find any Coach employee or even more than a literal handful of people at Coach Corporate with a personal reference library even close to that, I'd be seriously amazed.
If someone wants to be and claims to be an expert, they have to work at it. Up until recently, Coach didn't even care about maintaining an archive of their own production history - there are one or two employees who have been putting together a collection of Coach's styles over the years and buying them from private sellers and even flea markets because Coach Corporate never bothered.
Many authentic purses especially in solid color leather DO HAVE CC LININGS. Wherever you're getting your information, it's WRONG. Hi,
Thanks for that reply, however I got this message from a salesperson at at a coach boutique.So I was not informed correctly. And the same person told me this about the serial numbers....
This is something most people find hard to understand, but Coach employees including sales assistants have NO training about the history and development of the product they're selling. One common response most of us experienced with Coach will give to anyone who asks if they should take a disputed bag to a Coach store to be authenticated is that a Coach employee is the WORST possible person to ask. Most of the responders in this thread know more than a storeful of Coach employees because we've actually studied the bags and their history. A Coach employee may have 3 month's experience and barely know about the features of the bags in their current inventory - asking them about bags going back 20, 10 or even 5 years will almost never result in an accurate answer. Just like the question about the C lining - current bags including the all-leather ones may have solid color linings RIGHT NOW but that wasn't the case 4 or 5 years ago. And full-price store employees know absolutely NOTHING about styles made for the outlet (and vice versa!) - in fact, style numbers of outlet-only bags and other items aren't even in the full-price stores computers!
The comments from the person you talked to are just more proof, although I'd bet that if you searched this forum for the words "Coach employee" to research the kind of experience others have had, you'd find that just in the area of supposedly confirming or denying authenticity, store employees have been wrong at least 90 percent of the time. Phone employees such as Customer Service reps are even worse, if you can imagine that.
Just because someone works for a company doesn't make them an expert. They get no training and have no access to the most basic kind of information like the kind the posters in this and other forums share with other posters on a daily basis - most store employees don't even understand how to analyze a serial number or what the codes in the first half of the number signify. To become an expert, you have to work at it, it's not something you absorb just by punching a time card.
Just to use a simple example - at last count, I have probably close to 100 Coach catalogs, either actual or on cd, and a library of at least 50,000 photos of Coaches, real and fake. Add maybe 50 MB of text files that include information about Coach history, design details, and facts I've gathered from at least 6 years of analyzing Coach products. And that's just the low end of the scale - posters like BeenBurned and Noshoepolish probably have at least 5 times the saved information in their own files as I do. If you can find any Coach employee or even more than a literal handful of people at Coach Corporate with a personal reference library even close to that, I'd be seriously amazed.
If someone wants to be and claims to be an expert, they have to work at it. Up until recently, Coach didn't even care about maintaining an archive of their own production history - there are one or two employees who have been putting together a collection of Coach's styles over the years and buying them from private sellers and even flea markets because Coach Corporate never bothered.
so much for asking them about authenticity.
I will look at that thread and see what I did wrong... 
