Back in August, SIGG USA announced that metal, plastic-lined water bottles it had sold as “BPA-free” did, in fact, have plastic liners containing BPA. While the company insisted that the chemical didn’t leach into water. Reader Cassi owned eight bottles, and decided to participate in Sigg’s exchange program. Too bad the “exchange” part of the transaction isn’t going very smoothly.

I returned 8 older SIGG bottles to the company for the voluntary replacement program. Received confirmation that they received the bottles, and a few days later via email they sent me a gift certificate number for $188 to replace the bottles I had returned. Fine. Until I went to mysigg.com and tried to use the gift certificate.

I followed all of their instructions to the letter. Ordered exact replacements, totaling just under the gift certificate amount; left the ‘shipping method’ blank as they instructed, and entered the gift certificate number in the box. When I tried to submit the order, I got an error message asking me for my credit card number. Whuh? I re-tried the ordering process several times, making sure I copied the correct gift cert. number, etc. with no luck.

Sent an email to SIGG and did not receive a timely reply (within 36 hours).

Tried calling both the 800- phone number as well as the direct number to SIGG USA for customer service, and got a “Sorry, but this mailbox is full – please try again later” message.

After 2 days and another email, finally was able to leave a voicemail message with details and a return number. Never received a call back.

Sent 2 additional emails, detailing problem again … and got robo-reply(?) stating: “you should have received your gift certificate number by email”. Yes …. I am aware of that – it DOESN’T WORK! (Made a few irritated replies to the non-answers I was receiving). Repeated trying to reach them by phone.

Finally resorted to complaining to Twitter and Consumerist. They have my 8 bottles (which I never would have bought initially had I known the liners had BPA), they are unresponsive by email, and unreachable by phone, they have my bottles and I have a worthless gift certificate that expires at the end of this month. Very disappointing experience and will never buy a SIGG product again.

PREVIOUSLY:
Water Bottles Marketed To BPA-Fearing Parents Contained BPA All Along
SIGG Will Replace BPA-Containing Bottles For Free

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