Ah, young love. First, the deflowering. Then, the surreptitious placing of a bug in your beloved’s ear to move in together. This step is important — the trick is to link your assets to hers before she gets wise to what you’re really like. And finally, the all important joint purchase of a new piece of furniture cements her to you forever.

Except what happens when that piece of furniture never arrives? The average romance is already a ramshackle house of cards, just waiting for a petty grievance or disagreement to fling its hand through the pasteboard architecture. Damnation, ruin, a grim life of loneliness bookended only by the eternal solipsism of oblivion.

Reader Josh K. tells us more about The Bay, furniture and young love after the jump.

Hello, my name is Joshua K. My girlfriend and I were very excited
to be moving in together, her for the first time out of her mom’s house and me from out of an apartment shared with the roommate from hell. We were so excited that we went shopping for brand furniture in January for the move in May. After an exhaustive search, we found our couch and chair at The Bay in our native London, Ontario, Canada. We were quite pleased, and so we placed our order on January 15, with the anticipated delivery date of May 2. Because you are reading this here, you know that everything did not go as planned. I shall present the remainder of our saga in point form:

April 26 — We are told our couch would not be delivered until May 13. We have the delivery fees waived. We figure that sitting on the floor for two weeks won’t be so bad.

April 27 — We are told that The Bay has our couch and chair in stock at their clearance centre, and that they were sent there “by accident” and that they are in “new condition”. We are told we could have these delivered on May 2 as planned for $600 less. When pressed, customer service admits that the couch has been dyed the wrong colour. We opt to get the chair if it is actually in it’s described “new condition”.

May 2 — After being told the chair wouldn’t arrive until June 8, the chair is delivered. Before it is placed on the floor, a chunk of the front foot falls off. Calls are placed, the furniture manager is contacted.

May 13 — May 13 comes and goes without a couch. Because the date had been confirmed by both the store manager himself and the customer service centre, we are more than slightly ticked. We are told the delivery was scheduled for May 19, and they have no record of May 13 whatsoever.

May 18 — We are told the couch would not arrive May 19 as planned. The warehouse would not be receiving our furniture until after May 23. We reschedule delivery of the couch and chair and arrange for pickup of the broken clearance centre chair for May 27, our next day off. We hang up; the phone rings confirming delivery for May 19. We are confused.

May 19 — The couch arrives. The delivery guys break a ceiling tile and put a hole in my wall. I unwrap the couch and find that the leather is torn. Calls are placed.

May 20 — No one at The Bay seems to have heard of May 27. The furniture manager promises to get us a firm date and call us back before May 23. We call him because he does not call us as promised.

May 22 — Delivery guys show up unannounced to pick up the couch. I send them away empty handed, as I was told repeatedly that they would only pick up the couch when bringing me a new one.

May 25 — We are told to expect delivery no earlier than June 15 by the furniture manager.

This is how our furniture purchase stands as of this moment. We have both a chair and a couch, but both are defective. We have threatened to cancel our order, and the furniture manager has given us a nominal discount as a result. Our order was placed five full months before our new anticipated earliest date of delivery. It will have been six weeks from our initial promised delivery date to the date which we
actually receive our furniture. We are feeling resigned and entirely defeated in this matter, and we thought we should warn as many people as possible away from purchasing furniture from The Bay in the future.

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