Last night, I accidentally ordered a pair of pants while trying to get an estimate on shipping speed. Not only is the shipping going to take much longer than I’d hoped, I realized afterwards that I had the wrong size as well. No big deal, I thought, I’ll cancel the order.
Well, you can’t on their website. So I had to wait until this morning to call. I called them up as soon as they opened, hoping to get someone before the pants shipped out. And I did! Only, they still can’t cancel the order. They have to ship the pants across the country to me, and then I have to ship them back across the country to return them. The person I talked to even offered to print out the return label, and ship it with the pants!
Such a wasteful, broken system. I can only imagine it works the way it does to make people who have second thoughts on a purchase have to jump through additional hoops to cancel it.
Name and shame company.
Carhartt.
I did not expect that. That’s a big company.
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Not OP, but years ago I had my debit card info stolen. One of the purchases was for “The North Face”.
They made the purchases, had them shipped to their house, and out of the 33 purchases they made, The North Face was the only one that didn’t respect a fraudulant charge request.
They insisted I needed to send back the items for a refund.
Like…biiiiiiitch, do you not know what a fraudulant charge is???
Let me share a similar experience I had today.
Chewy autoshipped a flea collar for my dog that died last month. I contacted them and told them what happened, and they processed my refund immediately and told me to donate the collar to a friend or shelter when it arrives.
Not to distill your loss into a business lesson, but Chewy has a fantastic playbook they follow when a client’s pet dies. Expect some flowers & card from Chewy in the coming days.
They know that pet owners are incredibly likely to become pet owners again, and it’s a small write-off to convert a client into a lifetime customer.
Being good to your customers shouldn’t be some wild concept.
Right? They’ve manipulated me into giving them my business by going out of their way for me! The monsters!
Fucking manipulative assholes, gunna order some cat food from them. That’ll show them what happens when you treat a customer this way!
Chewy is pretty awesome for stuff like that. Condolences for your loss.
I’m sorry, friend. I lost my beloved dog on New Year’s unexpectedly. It’s the worst.
I’m so sorry for both of your losses. I wish I could tell you that it gets easier but so far, one year on, it hasn’t. I suppose the corollary of them being your best friend is that one day, all too soon, you’re saying goodbye to your best friend. I hope you have nice memories together to cherish. (Also I adopted another little guy in need before I was emotionally ready, and that ended up being the best decision.)
Thank you. It’s been three months, and although it hasn’t gotten much easier yet, I’ve been thinking about adopting another rescue. My last dog saved my life in multiple ways.
As soon as I read “Chewy” I knew it was going to be a much more reasonable response. Sorry you had to go through that little reminder, though.
I live in MA and knew someone who worked for Chewy. Seems like a good company all around. Except their Return to Office was asinine (if you were within ~100mi of their Boston HQ you had to return to office. One hundred fucking miles.)
You’ll probably get flowers from them as well.
Bet something’s broken in IT. Some system can’t talk to some other system. In any case, something stupid is broken in logistics. A desk jockey decided return labels were cheaper than implementing the solution, and that might well be true!
Making shit up: The frontend can’t talk to the backend without an expensive, highly specialized addon, which is a monthly subscription, which has to be applied to 1,000 machines. They could unwrap all that and simplify, but now we’re talking a massive overhaul that drags in 14 other systems, costs 10,000 man hours and had some inevitable downtown.
“Fuck it! We’re sending return labels!”
And this kids is why tech debt comes with usurious interest rates!
Tech debt
I’ve never heard this term before. It makes perfect sense for what it represents. Sorry it sounds like you speak from experience 😅
Technical debt applies not just to coding! (though it’s most often talked about in that context) It’s the general idea that whenever you rush a project by taking shortcuts, you have to spend more time later to sort it out (and let’s be honest, it’s never actually going to get sorted out)
It’s a serious term in IT! One of those things that’s recognized as an issue, and then blown off IRL.
Think of paying down a monster credit card bill while living like a monk. Only same thing to do, but it hurts in the short and midterm. Long term, you gonna pay far more.
When companies start telling you no for simple requests, just tell them they can cancel it or you can get your credit card company to do it.
This is the way. As soon as they hear “charge back” they’re going to scramble to satisfy you. If they don’t, they have no idea how screwed they’re going to be after too many of those.
Yeah, I really should’ve been more adamant about it. I was on my break at work and didn’t want to spend the whole time on the phone. I probably could’ve got a manager to cancel it or something. Probably still can. Oh well.
Wow that’s crazy.
I can imagine the situation where the order is committed and already getting processed in the warehouse and they don’t have a way to stop it going out the door, but if they’re able to intervene and add a return slip then that is just inexcusable
My thoughts exactly! Like if it were one of a hundred orders sitting in a pallet I’d get it. But I’m just imagining a cartoonish situation where the person on the phone is going, “these pants? This order right here? Ahh, yeah, I am physically incapable of not sending it out, but I can put a return label on it for you!”
I’ve had similar with other items in the sense of wait several days, no shipping notice so a week later message to cancel it, then several hours later get a ship notice and reply that ‘oh it went out already and you would have to wait to send it back’.
I’m guessing to do with some kind of drop shop inventory nonsense, makes no sense otherwise.
Such a wasteful, broken system
That’s 90% of online shopping there. It’s hard to hear, but we as costumers are part of the problem. Stop buying so much shit online. Go to a brick and mortar shop. Touch it, feel it, try those pants.
Online shopping is a fucking waste and every day we have dozens of shipping companies coming to the city with their vans to drive through each street bringing small packages to every apartment. Polluting, blocking streets, increasing traffic. Just because we are too lazy to go to a shop and buy it in person.
We probably don’t even need it. And yes, I know there’s not a shop next to me that sells X or Y. Do you know why? Because we’ve been killing small brick and mortar shops for 20 years with our online shopping. We created this problem and we have to fix it. Fuck the “broken, wasteful system” and support your local shop.
Online shopping is a fucking waste and every day we have dozens of shipping companies coming to the city with their vans to drive through each street bringing small packages to every apartment. Polluting, blocking streets, increasing traffic. Just because we are too lazy to go to a shop and buy it in person.
So It’s morally superior for me to be the one driving to the shop, polluting, blocking streets, increasing traffic, taking up a parking spaces?
There’s 20 families on my block. If the 20 of us got together and agreed that only one of us should drive to the store every day, picking up everything that we collectively needed and distributing it to us, you’d be praising us for reducing our impact.
Touch it, feel it, try those pants.
I really wish I could have. I never buy clothes that I haven’t already tried on, but I needed something specific for work, and as you’ve already guessed, the line of pants I settled on aren’t listed at any of their local-to-me retailers.
Though, full transparency, I took it a step further to make things worse by ordering the correct size through Amazon, since they’ll come in tomorrow rather than a week from now…
