Months ago, Katie and her then-fiancé got to experience one of the greatest joys of being engaged: setting up a registry at Macy’s and walking around zapping things with a scanning gun. Macy’s has a special program where couples earn rewards on every registry item purchased for them, and get 5% of the total spent back as a gift card. What a great idea! At least it would be if they hadn’t encountered an employee working in the bridal department who wasn’t entirely clear how the registry system works, and managed to set up two registries for them by mistake. There was a private one that actually had all of their stuff on it, then a public one that was empty. Bridal shower guests were confused when they found a totally empty registry. Then things got even worse. She expected store staff to be apologetic when they discovered the error, but no one really seemed to care.

If a store messes up your wedding registry experience, you’d expect them to bend over backwards to try and fix it right? Not at Macy’s.

My new husband and I decided to register at Macy’s because a friend told us about their rewards program. After the wedding, we get 5% of the value of the gifts bought off our registry and 10% of the value of everything we bought at Macy’s back as a gift card.

We set up our registry with a sweet older customer service rep in the bridal department who did not understand computers or the computerized registry system well. The process took took two hours, mostly because she kept getting confused and would have to start over again.

A few days before my bridal shower, we heard from frustrated guests that there was nothing on our registry. It turns out that in all her starting over, the woman at Macy’s had created two registries for us: one visible to the public, which was empty, and one visible only to us, which is where we had added our items. Having dealt with Macy’s phone customer service before, we decided not to waste more of our life explaining the issue to them and simply went online and switched the empty registry to private and the full one to public.

After the wedding we received our rewards gift card, but the amount on it was less than 10% of the amount we spent, let alone the gifts we received from guests, so I contacted customer service. The woman there told me that we had never enrolled in the program (then why did I get a rewards card?). Once I finally convinced her that we had, she informed me that by switching the registry from private to public, we automatically unenrolled ourselves (I couldn’t find anywhere on the website or in the pamphlet where this was explained), so we were not eligible for rewards on anything bought after we made that switch (basically all of the gifts bought off the registry).

I explained the situation and the mistake that the woman who set up our registry had made. Instead of apologizing profusely and correcting the problem or transferring me to someone who could, I was told the registry department would need to conduct an audit of my registry and may or may not decide to issue me the money we are owed.

However, these mysterious auditors are of course not interested in talking to me to get the details of the situation. On top of that, they’re not even going to contact me to tell me their decision. I have to call back in 5-7 days, jump through all the phone hoops again to get a live person and then explain the situation to yet another customer service rep who won’t know any of the backstory.

We’ll see what happens in 5-7 days, but I’m not impressed that the customer service department can’t even call me back and give me a heartfelt apology for wasting my time after my husband and I asked all our family and friends to buy wedding gifts for us there. I’ll be even less impressed if I don’t get my money back.

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