March 2007 Archives

The day after our couch story hit The Consumerist website, we received this email from Target...

I'm sorry for the inconvenience caused in this regard.

I have checked your order and I apologize that It seems that there
is a widespread problem with this item.

I am sorry that the original box isn't in good enough shape to send
back to us, but we don't have a replacement box to send you.
Fortunately, we're not picky about how you get the order back to us.
Feel free to use tape to fix up the original box or to find a
different box. If you don't have a box big enough to fit everything,
you can use as many as you need.

Once you've got everything packed up, please use the link at the
bottom of this e-mail to let us know how many boxes you used. Then
we'll help you finish up the return process.

As an apology for the inconvenience caused in this order, I have
issued a advance refund for the item in your order. However, I
request you to pack it with the needful and keep it ready for the
carrier to pick up the package.

Personally, I think it's a slap in the face, but oh well. This was never about our money, only about getting what we paid for. They issued us an "advance refund" but still expect us to return the couch. Do they think I am in such desperate need of money that I can't wait until the thing is returned to get it back?

The only time I ever asked for my money back was when I said that I was going to throw the couch into a lake, not return it, so if they think that I am going to go out of my way to return the couch to them just because they refunded my money, they are wrong. They can have it, but they're going to have to come and get it themselves. I will not box it, I will not wait for UPS, I will not return it to the store, I will not lift a single finger to help get their garbage back to them when I had not agreed on the terms beforehand.

I will instead write them a letter giving them a reasonable amount of time to remove their couch from our apartment without any help from me, before I claim the pieces of couch to be abandoned and therefore ours. At that point, we will use the money they refunded us to buy custom legs and screws to put the couch together and keep.

Also, their supplier, Homelegance Inc. updated their policy page shortly after The Consumerist story was posted to say this...

If you are an end user who has purchased our furniture through a store, please go to your store for service. Homelegance, Inc. is a wholesaler and does not deal with end users directly.

It then goes on to explain their policy for their wholesale customers (stores) to make parts orders!

The real tits of this latest development was this line from Target's final letter to us. I feel it deserves repeating...

I have checked your order and I apologize that It seems that there is a widespread problem with this item.

Now, I think that that's a canned, bullshit response that they give to make customers feel better for some stupid reason... BUT, to me, that line is insane. If there IS in fact a "widespread problem" with this couch, why is it still for sale on Target.com or why haven't they fixed the problem and set up a proper system for parts orders?

There you go folks, if you're thinking about buying a couch from Target, understand beforehand that Target has an admittedly widespread problem with their product.

Okay, okay, okay, the baby girl, Sophie, isn't ours, but in fact Adam and Kelly's, but we were going to steal her if it weren't for her hospital issued tracking booty.

That is this year's thing. I am supposed to be writing a novel this year.

It's been five years since I finished my first novel. Maybe more than that, I don't know. I do know that it was something I finished and that's more than I can say about a lot of things.

I haven't finished much of anything since E and I moved down to Florida, since we were in Connecticut and I worked on Eating Stella Style and Ribcage: Volume 1. It was mostly Connecticut where I popped out 200 pages of that still unfinished, eternally unfinished non-fiction book as well.

My non-fiction book or memoir or whichever is an interesting little enigma for me to figure out. This blog you may or may not have noticed can shed a great deal of light onto the struggles I am having with said book.

I am not sure to which extent I am comfortable as a "public figure". I never was, actually, but I'm even less now. I've taken E into my world, married her, grown a few years and opening up every inch of my life to criticism doesn't seem fair. Without full truths and every inch, a book about my experiences is nothing and I know this, so if it has to be that way, then it has to be about the writing first and foremost. I only wish to put a story, a book, into the world... not myself and my life and that is a hard line not to cross. I feel I've crossed it more than once in the past few years and the results were very telling.

My essay, Nine Lives for the Fat Kid Frame of Mind crosses that line all over the place and that, that is the only reason why I put a price tag on the download. I'm not looking for seventy-whatever cents here and there, I'm looking for a filter. It's a good piece of writing and I think a lot of people have enjoyed it, but I won't open that much of my life to every single wandering websurfer.

I get rejection letters for short story submissions all the time. Most rejection letters are little postcards now and I keep them. They don't upset me in the least. It's all about the writing with my little rejection postcards and I like that. It's business or it's art and I'll just keep chugging away. I'll keep getting better. My life, however, does not change and nor do my choices. Those are solely mine, those are no business but my own... unless I keep putting them out there.

So I have a dillema there. For now, I'll wait until my writing, my art can present my non-fiction book as just that... artful writing.

I have other plans at the moment. That novel. And two characters we all may know.

Our story hit The Consumerist today, which is fantastic. It's like we're one screw closer to having the couch we paid for!

I'm going to go into this next round with customer service as energized as ever.

Target's supplier of the couch, Homelegance, Inc. took some time to track down, as I guess they take a backseat with Target, allowing the furniture to appear as Target's own brand, or no discernable brand for that matter. Their website was down until recently, but I had contacted them without response a few weeks back. Today, I read this on their FAQ page.

How can I receive parts and/or services for the furniture I purchased? Please request all parts and/or services through your authorized Homelegance, Inc. dealer.

More updates to come and then possibly... the in-store return. Anyone in the Orlando area want to join us for the event? There are eight pieces of the couch and I figure we could certainly make this the parade that I've been promising Target.

Get out last year's Halloween costumes!

You see, Elise and I got married and we went to Italy. When we returned, we started an overhaul of our place. Blowing up photos, hanging paintings, putting out the new appliances and trying to buy a new bookcase from Target.

We had this ladder bookcase in mind and it was expensive for a Target bookcase. A hundred smackers, actually, but we'd been eyeing it and we'd finally broken down. Target was displaying it proudly on an endcap and everything, with little cards that you take to an employee to retrieve it from the back. The first Target we went to was a bust, as the employee tried and tried to scan the card with a handheld scanner, looked confused and then just said, "We're all out of them."

A few days later, at a second Target store and another endcap displaying the ladder bookcase, another employee scanned the card and said, "It's discontinued."

"But you have no more in the back?"

"No, it's discontinued."

"If it's discontinued, can we buy this floor model then?"

"No."

Then we just gave up on our $100 ladder bookcase, settling on a smaller, simpler $20 model that does just fine. We saved eighty bucks, exactly what Target lost.

It made sense to me then why the first employee at the first store tried to scan the card so many times, his handheld scanner buzzing each time, before just saying that they were all out. Because it was telling him that it was discontinued, just like the second store told us. But it was confusing as to why both stores were displaying a discontinued item so prominently and why I had not seen it displayed in that way before the day we tried to buy it. Why would it get it's own special display and be discontinued in the same week? And why didn't that second woman, at least take all of the little cards that you're SUPPOSED to be able to trade for your new bookcase off the hook once she found out that the item was discontinued? Seemed like an easy solution to me. If I saw that the cards were all taken, I would just assume it was out of stock and move on.

Neither stores offered to check their stock rooms where they should be, just to make sure that they didn't have any.

The next week after that, after buying and assembling our second choice bookshelf, the original ladder bookshelves were still displayed in our local Targets... but not only that, they were now ON SALE. Funny that a "discontinued" and out of stock item would warrant a special sale price, huh?

Their loss, whatever, and all of that... but at the same time we were waiting for our new couch to arrive.

For our wedding my grandparents gave us a new armchair from our Target registry and it was missing a screw when we assembled it. But it didn't seem to be a very important screw and it's holding up just fine. It's not the most comfortable chair, but it's as comfortable and a whole heck of a lot better looking than our old living room furniture.

So the first thing we did when we returned from Italy was order the matching sofa from Target.com. $400 for a full-size sofa was a steal, even with a $100 shipping charge. I now realize that $500 would have been better spent on someone that trains birds of prey to train a very large hawk to peck my eyeballs out and build nests in their sockets.

The sofa that I am talking about is Target's Metropolitan Upholstered Sofa in the color Chocolate. To get this straight it is a Target Metropolitan Sofa in a color also known as Mocha. Metropolitan Upholstered Sofa Chocolate at Target.com .

Okay, now that I've said that in enough different ways that Google will surely index this post nice and good for any curious Target couch shoppers to stumble upon, I can continue with the story...

The shipping method for this full-sized sofa was listed online as "Target Ground" which was a sigh of relief for me, because I was horrified of the prospect that a single UPS man would have to deliver such a large thing up three flights of stairs to our apartment. We ordered the couch on February 16th and it had an estimated delivery of February 22nd through February 27th. On February 27th it arrived by "Target Ground" which it turns out, is really just code for UPS. Code for a single UPS man delivering two packages as big as him up three flights of stairs.

He said "I don't know why these companies think we're furniture delivery men."

I totally agreed with him.

Had I known the $100 delivery was going to be that awkward, I probably just would've gone to a real furniture store with real delivery to begin with.

When I ripped open the boxes, it was apparent that the largest piece of the couch was still missing. That would be the entire back of it.

It arrived the next day, a day after the last day of the projected window of arrival. The same UPS man. He said, "There's the REST OF IT," and sounded a lot less jokey than the day before. This package was indeed larger than the two previous and it was also ripped open all over. Thankfully, nothing inside was damaged.

Nothing was damaged, but it certainly was missing the bag of hardware and all four legs. We finally had our brand new couch and now screws to put it together! No legs for it to stand on.

Elise was freaking out, but it was no big deal, I thought. I would call Target and they would get us the replacement parts shipped out overnight. The first Target customer service rep we talked to was extremely helpful and went on a search to find their supplier of the couch before saying that he would contact them and put in a parts order for us and hanging up.

An hour later we got a message from him saying that the parts order "wouldn't go through" and that our only option was to exchange the entire couch for a new one.

The thought that their only solution to a bag of missing screws was to have our giant pieces of couch picked back up by UPS and then three more giant boxes of couch delivered by UPS enraged me. Not to mention the fact that the packaging of our original couch was in no condition to be repackaged for a UPS return. I don't exactly have 7 foot couch boxes lying around, either.

Thus began the last month of my dealings with Target's customer service. Half a dozen phone calls and a whole dozen emails to them and the company that first person said was their supplier and we are absolutely nowhere. $500 out and pieces of couch all over our living room for an entire month now!

Finally though I was given a second option...

I'm sorry for any inconvenience you've experienced with this situation.

Yes, the "Metropolitan Upholstered Sofa - Chocolate" may be returned
to a Target Store.

We will issue a full refund for most items returned in new condition
within 90 days of shipment, with the original packaging and
accessories. If you no longer have the original box, the store
should still be able to accept the return in most cases.

The store associate will issue the refund back to the original
payment method (credit card or GiftCard).

However, our stores aren't set up to refund shipping or Gift Wrap
charges. So after you return the item at Store, please contact us
so that we can refund you for the associated shipping charges.

They WANT us to return the couch to a Target store over getting on the phone and getting me a few small parts! They want us to drop a bunch of pieces of couch, out of box, in their customer service department!

Now this is hilarious and will, it seems as of now, be our final solution to this stupid mess... but it's not easily done at the moment, as this sucker certainly won't fit in our little car. Thinking about how I have to put so much thought into just getting this stupid couch to their store to probably cause a scene with the store's customer service people really, really set me off.

This is why I've now decided that until I can get this thing into a store, I'll just keep writing emails to Target. I no longer believe that they can be of any help whatsoever, but writing them increasingly more off the wall letters brings me at least some satisfaction over the whole thing.

This is the letter I wrote to them yesterday...

Hello! I would like a full refund for this couch, including the cost of shipping, as I am DONE dealing with your company! Maybe you can see from my MANY previous emails or possibly notations from all of the calls my wife and I have made to customer service that our lovely couch that we purchased with money we received as a gift for our wedding... that we purchased to match the matching chair that my grandmother bought us for our wedding (and is in fine condition, but useless as it does not have a matching couch to compliment it and never will it seems)... our lovely couch came missing all of the hardware and legs to actually put it together. Returning such a massive thing seems absurd and returning through the mail is simply impossible as UPS will not ship anything out of box and I wouldn't know how to begin to find a box big enough for this six foot couch. Returning it in store is what I truly would love to do, as it would be hilarious and I would film it for my own enjoyment (sending a copy to your corporate headquarters, of course... so that you can see how I tell every customer that looks at my wife and I and our massive pieces of couch about our experiences with it) but returning in store would require the rental of a truck, as this thing could nowhere near fit into our compact car. It is ALMOST worth me biting the bullet and paying for that truck rental, but I've decided the best option for me at this point is to throw the pieces of the couch into a lake. I think you would also agree that that is my best option, dear Target, as you have not offered any better. Please refund all of my money for this purchase, I will draw you a map to the lake that I will throw the couch into and we can make our return.

I received this from Target in response...

I'm sorry for the problem with your order. We’ll be happy to help
you out with this return. UPS will pick up the "Metropolitan
Upholstered Sofa - Chocolate" and when we get it back, we'll refund
you the cost of your order. The request for pick up has been issued
to the shipping address.

We can't confirm the exact pick-up time or date with UPS. They
should make the first attempt within the next 5-7 business days.

Here's what you need to do to get your order ready for pickup:
-The driver will bring the return label, so you don't need to
put one on the package.
-Put the item back in its original packaging.
-If you're not sure that you'll be home when UPS comes,
remember to leave the package where they can find it.

To which I replied with this...

This does not resolve my issue, but instead creates a whole different issue to deal with! A UPS man coming to my door when I have stated in every email that I DO NOT have the original packaging, as the original packaging was quite damaged and dirty and I did not want to drag it in and onto my carpet, so I cut the couch out of it outside. I cannot find any kind of packaging large enough to house a six foot couch. I did, however, like the part of the email where it said I could leave the package where he could see it if I was not home. I could leave this package on the MOON and he could see it, as it is taking up quite a lot of space amongst our apartment and has been for one month now. You see all I wanted were the missing pieces that should have come with my couch, but I guess that isn't possible, so I will just have to buy a hacksaw and saw this couch into tiny, tiny pieces and then eat each and every piece to finally remove it from my life, one bite at a time.

To be continued, I'm sure...