It’s not a good sign for the prospects of the American working class when the president of a rapidly-expanding rent-to-own household goods company observes that items are coming back to his stores so quickly that it’s “like a Blockbuster.” Yes, it could be that a family just wanted to rent a big-screen TV for a special event, but items are more likely to come back because a customer couldn’t make their payments. [More]
furniture
IKEA Forgets To Deliver Your Hardware, Can Send It From Sweden
By 7.22.13
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. [More]
UPS Fails To Use The Buddy System When One Of My Packages Wanders Off
By 3.20.13
When two items go out together as part of the same shipment, should they necessarily stay together? Nowal’s parents got her twins a table and chairs for their birthday, which shipped out in two packages. The toddlers celebrating their birthdays might understand the buddy system, but UPS doesn’t: even though the two packages shipped as a two-package shipment, one box arrived on time while the other disappeared into the bowels of the UPS system because of a damaged label. [More]
Ashley Furniture Wants To Charge Restocking Fee For Out-Of-Stock Item
By 1.9.13
If you order a backordered item that was never in stock in the first place, should you have to pay a restocking fee when you cancel the order? That’s the quandary that Emmanuel finds himself in. Store employees failed to tell him that the couch he wanted was on backorder until after he had already paid, so he came back to the store a day later to cancel the order. Ashley couldn’t do that…without a 30% restocking fee. What did they restock, precisely? [More]
Customer Spends 5 Months On Uneven Couch Because Jennifer Convertibles Can’t Get Its Act Together
By 1.7.13
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. [More]
Walmart Sold Us A High Chair Covered With Food And Mold As New
By 12.28.12
Part of the delight of Christmas morning is opening up fresh, shiny, untouched gifts. Our new stuff gets wrapped in colorful paper outside of the boxes and layers of protective plastic by the Asian teenagers who made them for us. Jan’s great-grandson is still a baby, so he probably didn’t care one way or the other about the condition of his gifts, but the grown-up family members did. The high chair they bought him had been used. Used a lot. And it was covered with food and mold. It should be their baby who has the privilege of throwing spaghetti on his high chair, not someone else’s. [More]
Tell Us Your Bonded Leather Horror Stories
By 7.31.12
Now, before you think we’ve gone and gotten kinky on y’all, please note that the discussion here is about bonded leather, which is sort-of-but-not-really leather that gets used in a lot of things, like that set of encyclopedias you keep around to impress the ladies. For the purposes of this post, we’re talking about furniture with bonded leather upholstery — and whether or not you were told the product was actual leather. [More]
Target’s Furniture Quality Control Department: You
By 7.12.12
Steve bought a patio set from Target, and discovered when he went to assemble it that a part was missing. No problem, he thought: either Target or the manufacturer, Smith and Hawken, would have more parts available. Well….no. As it turns out, Target bought the Smith and Hawken brand, and products under that name are now contract manufactured for Target. The products seem all right…until something goes wrong. Then, like Steve, you learn that customers are apparently Target’s quality control department for this furniture, and when something goes wrong, there are no spare parts. [More]
Hey, Restoration Hardware, Come Restore The Crappy Finish Of My $18K Patio Set
By 6.4.12
I was always under the–apparently incorrect–impression that when you pay the prices that places like Restoration Hardware command for their furniture, you get some kind of guarantee along with that. Say, that if you drop eighteen grand on some beautiful weathered-finish patio furniture, that beautiful finish isn’t going to just weather itself right off the furniture in under a year. Dennis has learned that this isn’t the case. [More]
$5K Customer Is Very Insignificant Person To Raymour & Flanigan
By 5.14.12
Maybe $5,000 isn’t a lot to furniture retailer Raymour & Flanigan, but it is to Jeff and his fiancée. That’s how much they dropped on furniture during a “VIP” sale at one of their stores. Most of the furniture has been delivered and is pretty great, but the two recliners they ordered were due to arrive weeks ago, and still haven’t showed up. It’s not that the furniture isn’t there, Jeff explains. The real issue is that no one seems to care about keeping the couple updated. They would like to know when they’ll finally be getting something to sit on. [More]
Finally Fix That Obnoxious Wobbly Wooden Chair
By 2.20.12
It’s easy to forget about a wobbly chair until a visitor gets stuck with it and highlights your incompetence with an offhand remark. If you’ve got a chair like that but have never mustered the time or will to fix it, maybe learning about how it’s done will give you the encouragement you need. [More]
Walmart Sends Me Cheaper Bed Frame Than I Ordered, Shrugs
By 10.19.11
Cassandra had a confusing problem with Walmart. She ordered a bed frame to be delivered to her local store. She happened to order a black frame, which was more expensive than the similar (but out of stock) bronze-colored frame. When she got the box home, though, she noticed that new labels had been put over the areas on the box identifying the frame’s color. The labels identified the frame as black. The box itsef identified it as bronze. The frame inside was bronze. So who altered the box, and why? [More]
When Buying A Mattress From Sears, Maybe Also Invest In A Truck
By 10.14.11
This probably isn’t news to you, Sears, but you’ve lost another customer for good. This time, it’s reader Jeff, who had a nice experience buying a mattress at his local Sears store, but a terrible experience trying to get the mattress delivered to his house. People do not enjoy taking a vacation day from work and then not having the delivery person show up. Four times. [More]
Should We Meddle In Furniture Sales Commissions?
By 7.18.11
Susan and her husband recently made a decent-sized purchase from Raymour & Flanigan, a chain in the Northeast that sells nice quality furniture. On a return visit to make some changes to their order, they learned that the original person who helped them had to split his commission on the sale with another saleswoman who happened to key in Susan’s order while the original salesman was on a lunch break. Susan thinks this is unfair, and wants to defend the original salesman’s right to the entire commission. But is it her fight, or is that just the nature of commission sales? [More]
Martha Stewart Tables Are Still Exploding Glass In Your Face
By 6.27.11
FOX31 reports a family in Colorado was just chilling on the porch during a barbecue when all of a sudden their Martha Stewart glass table exploded, sending shards of tempered glass flying all over the place. The son and his girlfriend bled from cuts and lacerations after they were hit by the glass. This is a line of tables that have racked up similar exploding glass complaints for years and though they are not being sold any more, there are some still out there in people’s homes, ticking glass bombs waiting to go off. [More]
Things They Won't Tell You At The Furniture Store
By 2.8.11
Furniture shopping can be a daunting, and often expensive, process. But, unless you like the feel of sleeping, sitting and eating off your floor, it’s a process we all must endure. [More]
Turn Two IKEA Chest Of Drawers Into A Captain's Bed
By 12.2.10
Crafty gal Suz went a little nuts and decided to turn two chest of drawers into a bed. Measure carefully, saw them in half, throw a mattress on top, and boom, you’ve got yourself a DIY captain’s bed. She walks you through how she did it, so you can play the home version of the furniture remix game. [More]
Cocon Is A Sleeping Bag Chair
By 10.12.10
Cocon is a chair with a built-in sleeping bag. I have not tested it, but I’m personally intrigued by the concept. It looks extra cozy. This would be awesome for when you are lazing around and realize you would really like to have a blanket or a sleeping bag, but don’t want to have to get up and pull it out of the closet. Never fret, you’re already sitting in it! Zip up and snuggle down for a long-winter’s coma. [More]
