Wow. Williams Sonoma has really good customer service when I have ordered online or bought in their stores. It sounds like their offshoot is a totally different operation or WS has outsourced their customer service to some low rent call center.

West Elm pisses me off because they leave their doors wide open at all times of day. Especially this day in age, you'd think a company like that would be a little more conscious of air conditioning the whole freaking world.

Huh, I was actually just considering ordering some furniture from West Elm -- sounds like that is off. Nothing frustrates me more than companies that jerk me around on shipping.

I have always had good service with West Elm. When I ordered a bed frame one of the pieces came slightly damaged, I called requesting a new piece and they shipped me a whole new bedframe for free within days. They never contacted me about the original so I now have two frames.

I have ordered numerous items, including large furniture from West Elm over the past 4 years. The quality has been great and I never experienced any shipping delays. Give them another chance, everyone screws up once in a while.

@tozmervo: Do us all a favor and never come to Florida for vacation. You'd probably have a coronary if you saw all the open doors on air conditioned buildings at the theme parks.

Eh, annoying, but a Jan 5-13th isn't too long... We've had much worse horror stories here. (weeks!)

In any case, i'd start thinking chargeback at 2 weeks.

@atarisuicide: Yeah, I really like the catalog. That's upsetting that they aren't good about shipping.

I had some weirdness as well when ordering my table from West Elm online. The charge showed up and it took a couple weeks for the item to ship, with no real indication of the state of the transaction. And their customer service couldn't tell me when it would ship. I eventually got it, and its pretty snazzy.

Yeah, something definitely up. I had a similar issue in the same time frame. Had to call last week and get things moving. My items didn't ship until Tuesday, but they SHOULD be here tomorrow or Friday depending on our local weather.

@bohemian:

Actually, I've really only had fairly decent service with them, but that might have been because we bought something from a store, rather than the website.

A few months ago, Mr. Samanthamaphone and I broke our bed. It was a platform bed, and the center beam just snapped in half one morning (we had owned it for about a year and a half). I called the store and explained the situation, and that we weren't looking for a replacement bed, just the beam since everything else was intact. They said to stop by the store and get the beam (not around the corner, but they were being nice, so we thought we'd meet them halfway.) We get to the store to discover that the beam wouldn't actually fit in our car, no matter how hard we tried. They also said they didn't want to split up a perfectly good kit, so they just gave us the whole new frame, with shipping, for free! They really were quite lovely.

I can't speak for their online customer service, but if you're interested in West Elm, I'd recommend going into an actual store--you might get better service.

Williams-Sonoma owns West Elm? Gaah!

I like what they have at W-S and have bought a lot there over the years.

But my wife and I wandered into the local West Elm (Corte Madera) just after it opened. It's like Ikea for poor-but-pretentious New Yorkers: lots of cheaply made, trendy crap. Most folks in Marin County prefer real and quality; I can't figure out who they're selling to here. Maybe twenty-somethings drive up from San Francisco?

@bobert: You're going to crap your J Crews when you discover 'W-S' also owns Pottery Barn. Yes, this company markets to three different demographics!

I, a poor-but-pretentious non-New Yorker, recently ordered a headboard from West Elm and it was trendy and it was cheap to buy. It also arrived one day after the delivery notification hit my inbox.

Their reporting is flawed, but delivery has always been well within their estimated shipping time - in my experience.

You make me feel dirty and used, bobert.

I used to love West Elm a few years ago but it's basically turned into Pottery Barm as of late. I keep asking them to stop sending me catalogs because they go right in the recycling bin but they refuse. I'd take them to work but I don't want to encourage bad taste. Shady shipping practices is yet another negative to tack on to the pile.

@Joey_Brill:

The Marin County reference should give you reason enough not to feel dirty and used. Some serious snobbery going on there.

I used to work at one of their call centers - all of Williams-Sonoma is so horribly run. They use an antiquated system that can't make any edits to an order once it is placed, only a request can be put in to the people in the warehouse (which won't be read by anyone until after the order has shipped).

Additionally, I met Chuck Williams and he's a filthy old man.

@atarisuicide: I've ordered multiple things over the years from them with no problems. In fact, I needed one item sooner than I thought, and even though it was in the process of being shipped, she was able to make that change to the order.

Who knows what's happening in this case -- it doesn't sound good. But no one should judge a store based on one person's unfortunate incident.

OK...that West Elm pic totes FTW!!

Who made that? it really is super awesome/

@atarisuicide: I'm going to say this is possibly a few and far between problem. It sucks for that person but I like some of the things the have and was planning on purchasing from them. Granted they do have some things that look a little low quality or tacky, but they have some really nice furniture designs too. I can put up with waiting a couple weeks, but any more than that and it's more than just a shipping problem.

I've ordered from the West Elm website before with no problem ... sure, it took ages to deliver, but I expected that.

Terrell should just wait... not sure why they're pulling the trigger so soon. Antsy antsy.

@tozmervo: It's a marketing trick. People that are hot stop by the doors to cool off and come inside since, hey, they're there and it's cool inside.

@TinkishDelight: FYI- Williams-Sonoma also owns Pottery Barn.

I have no affiliation with the company other than as a long-time customer, but I have found dealing with all of the Williams-Sonoma companies to be among the easiest. In-store sales associate knowledge is higher than any other chain and customer-service actually means "customer service".

Apparently your mileage may vary, but I bet they eventually make this 100% right.

@bobert: WTF "poor but pretentious New Yorkers?!?!" Get a life, there are plenty of those in the Bay Area, too. And in SoCal, Texas, Chicago, Lisbon, Moscow, ET CETERA.

Seriously. Marin County is nice, but eff off. Jerk.

@Edge101: I've also had fine service from West Elm over the last few years with various orders. I agree with Edge101 that one situation like the OP's isn't enough to declare a business a customer service disaster area.

Unless you've got additional examples, it seems odd to define this as the way the entire company operates all the time with each order.

Well, I'd never even heard of these guys (and we're in the process of buying furniture) but since we're fans of Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn-style items, we would have probably discovered it eventually.

Now I'm not so sure I'd buy from them.

Consumerist in action, I'd say.

@benh57:

I agree, especially if the OP placed the order in the evening of the 5th, and especially if you paid for regular shipping.

Most places ship within 5 - 7 business days for ground, and the OP was so mad after 3-4 that they wanted to cancel? It's not good that it wasn't shipped by the first phone call, but not bad enough to call the whole company terrible.

I say if the items haven't been received or aren't in transit with a tracking number by the end of the week, the charge back seems appropriate.

@gondaba: I think the problem is that he didn't expect to have to wait ages -- he wanted the items quickly, and the website said they were available for immediate delivery. That does not translate to "expect to wait a really long time for your stuff." And if he's never ordered from there before, they've charged his credit card, and they can't give him ANY idea of when the items will arrive, and they can't or won't cancel the order, I don't blame him for being upset -- it would sound shady to me, too.

@benh57: Yeah, we ended up waiting about 6 weeks before finally getting a product we ordered from one company. It was a very large item, so we expected it to take a little longer than usual for shipping, but after two weeks we started to worry. So we tried emailing, then calling, then emailing. We finally got through to someone by email and they said the product had sold out. My husband emailed back to ask if they had a similar product, and if not, if they would refund the money. They emailed again to say "oh wait, we still have one - do you want it?" HOLY FREAKING CRAP! Of course we want it, that's what we ordered! We finally got the product a couple of weeks after that conversation.

Lumenlabs.com has great prices on home projection stuff, but their service really sucks.

@benh57:
I didn't think they were supposed to charge you until it shipped?

@Jabes: Correct. I understand the point everyone is making about their own great experiences with West Elm, but there is a huge gap between offering things for immediate shipment at the point of sale, and then failing to provide any information or service after the money has been collected. Even if this is a one-time thing, the fact that West Elm doesn't have a protocol for solving Terrell's problem is a legitimate customer service issue.

Maybe this only happens to one out of every 25 shoppers (I'm making up that figure, obviously), but if West Elm isn't doing anything to solve it, then it's a real problem.

Wow. Didn't realize other people had issues with West Elm too. I ordered a duvet and matching shams from them, all marked on the site as available. As soon as the credit card went through, I had an email saying that the shams would come immediately, but the duvet was back ordered. Estimated ship date of Dec 4.

The several weeks and estimated ship date had come and gone. On the 4th I called customer service. The woman told me, "Yes, that's on track to ship on Dec. 4." "That was yesterday." "Oh....?" She had no answer for me.

Three more emails pushed back the ship date three more times. Effin' ridiculous. I would have canceled the order but those matching, expensive shams had been opened and on my bed -- no way they'd take 'em back.

FINALLY got the damn duvet, 2 months after ordering. And it doesn't fit my comforter. Silly me, I assumed comforter/duvet sizes are standard (having worked in a home goods store, this was not a naive assumption). But I guess West Elm wants you to only use *their* comforters with their duvets.

So now I've got a very expensive, ill-fitting duvet that needs tailoring. Pain in the ass experience. But at least the product is pretty...

@Erica Hruby: Oops, should say: "On the 5th I called customer service."

@eric...ERIC: I would like to hear more about Chuck Williams being a filthy old man.

@Erica Hruby: The whole thing sounds like a sham to me.

I have made purchases from West Elm both in-store and online. In my on-line experiences the items have actually arrived faster than I expected. On two of the many times I've shopped there, the product quality (or condition when arrived) has been questionable. I have had the most pleasant experiences while dealing with their customer service. They have gone above and beyond when replacing any damaged articles. I had more of an issue with the delivery company (which is outsourced) than with West Elm itself. I recommend being as nice as possible whenever you are dealing with anyone in customer service, regardless of how frustrated you are. Ultimately the person on the other end of the line, though a representative of the company, may not have directly been the cause of your bad experience. Therefore, maybe explaining to "Wendy" that you understand it's not directly her fault but you are very frustrated by the delay in the process, etc. and that you can appreciate anything she can do to help you out, will get you further a lot faster than taking out your impatience on her.

Call their customer relations number and get crazy. They hand out gift cards to appease customers usually. We've purchased around 15 items from them and had 10+ of them be damaged. They're shipping methods are horrible. You can't ship poorly packaged furniture any other way than via a freight carrier. They use UPS and UPS sucks. They bang stuff up all over the place.

Anyway...call customer relations. I was able to get the cell phone number for the West Elm district manager. Still waiting for that gift card she was going to send me though...

West Elm occasionally has great stuff, but I'll never buy from them again. 1. They charge an insane amount for shipping. 2. They have the worst store credit card. Horrible site and customer experience. They should dump the company who is managing this for them.