Buying a new couch is often a pricey endeavor, so if that piece of furniture is found to be faulty after only a few weeks, you would probably expect the seller to do the proper thing and replace it. But the folks at Jennifer Convertibles might disagree.

Back in August, a New Jersey woman spent nearly $2,000 at Jennifer, and she inspected everything when it was delivered to make sure that nothing on the leather furniture was scratched, ripped, or otherwise damaged.

But as she soon found out, the cushions were all of drastically different firmness.

“It became obvious that the seat cushions were so different that the people seated in them were falling into each other, some sinking in and some sitting so high that their feet didn’t even touch the floor,” she tells the Newark Star-Ledger’s Bamboozled column.

So only 19 days after buying her new couch, she contacted Jennifer to see what could be done. Little did she know she was diving down the rabbit hole where she’d spend the rest of the year dealing with what she came to call the “Masters of the runaround.”

Jennifer customer service agreed to send a tech out to inspect the cushions. A couple weeks later, the tech — from a third-party inspection company, was finally at her house and agreeing with her assessment on the cushion issue.

She told the inspector that she would like a replacement couch. “He replied that he knew Jennifer Convertibles, and they would want to repair it,” she tells Bamboozled.

Then began a couple weeks of waiting for Jennifer to acknowledge the inspector’s report. When it finally did, the customer learned that because she didn’t file her claim within 7 days of receiving the furniture, she had to give Jennifer a chance to repair the problem first.

This would require about a month — assuming the replacement parts were in stock. She attempted to issue a charge-back via her credit card company but after some initial hopefulness, ultimately her card company said Jennifer had to be given a chance to make the repairs.

Now into October, the customer could not get anyone to confirm a delivery date for the replacement parts, nor would anyone provide her with a copy of the inspector’s report. She eventually was given a delivery but delays (and presumably Hurricane Sandy) pushed that until after Thanksgiving.

But when the tech — the same one who had done the earlier inspection — arrived to finally make the repair, it was not good news:

[T]he tech said that he shouldn’t have to repair new furniture, and that if a repair was tried by stitching in the seat cushions, they would be damaged. The tech also said the cushions would deflate rapidly because they were not “good density,” and that the fix was too much work to do in-home and that the furniture should be replaced…

The tech even showed the customer the earlier report — the one that no one at Jennifer would allow her to see — showing his recommendation that the furniture should be replaced.

He filed another report, which resulted in more runaround from Jennifer.

On Dec. 14, a Jennifer rep told the customer that the new report was “unclear” and that it needed to look into the matter further.

After several more days of being told to call back the next day, she finally got Bamboozled involved.

Within a week of being contacted by the newspaper, the store was calling to say could exchange her furniture or get $1,911 (the full amount) in store credit. Catch is, if she wanted an exchange, she’d have to wait six weeks.

“I told him I wanted my money back,” says the customer. The store manager says he’d have to look into that.

A rep for the company finally told Bamboozled that, “The end result is we are going to pick up the furniture in question and issue a full refund.”

Had Jennifer Convertibles simply done what the customer asked — and what its own contracted inspector suggested — back in September, it would have saved its employees time and effort, and possibly retained a customer for future purchases. But by dragging this process on — to the point where it only got resolved with the media’s involvement — it has gained nothing except a former customer and some bad press.

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