Maria lives in a big city and has no car. So when she bought a huge amount of furniture at her local IKEA, she had two choices: rent a car so she could pick, load, and haul her own flat packs home, or pay extra and have her order put together and delivered. The order went great except for one teeny thing that IKEA forgot. The hardware.

“This would be much easier than renting a car, right?” she wrote to Consumerist. “I wish I had rented the car.”

She writes:

First, trying to submit the order for the items to be picked took about 30 minutes as the system was not accepting the order. Technical glitch, perhaps? I assumed so.

Secondly, I tried to then take my receipt with the barcode (which took about 4 times to print out correctly, I would like to add) to the Delivery section of the store. This is where the ridiculousness began. No one seemed aware which line I was to stand in to hand my receipt to…so I wound up checking all three lines and standing in them each. Let’s add about another hour to this saga. Finally, I shelled out the 150 in order to get the items picked and delivered. Troubles end? Just getting started.

The items were delivered (late). Then, although all the boxes were present, the most important part was missing – all the IKEA hardware that is necessary to hold the furniture together!! I call Ikea. Their response? “We can order you the hardware from Sweden and it will arrive in 5-7 business days.” I replied, “But you just delivered the item in [my city], and it’s available in the store.” This is when the woman on the line became snippy (to put it mildly) with me, and continued to repeat this line. I asked to speak to the manager, and after about 20 minutes on hold, I was told, “I can give you a 20 dollar gift certificate to the store.”

So, I spent approximately 600 dollars on furniture, 150 dollars on delivery, and now have to spend about 3 hours out of my day to trek back to [the store] to pick up screws and nails.

At least she didn’t have to go to Sweden herself?

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