At last, our Ikea sofa set arrived today, and after hours of assembly (I’ll never remove those covers for cleaning) it was finally done.
While Irene is happy with the sofa (and I’m not displeased) the path to happiness wasn’t smooth.
Here’s the story of the Ikea fiasco associated with this sofa.
I was hoping to purchase and have the sofa delivered before Christmas as Irene’s present. For some months she’s been trying to get me to purchase a sofa set, and I’ve been putting it off with the idea of surprising her for Christmas.
There’s no way I could surprise her if I had to arrange for one of our friends to help me purchase and move the sofa, so I decided to bite the bullet and pay Ikea’s delivery charges.
I went to their website on about November 30th and was pleased to learn that if you buy from “Ikea Online” within the next three days you received a 10% discount. (On $1,400 worth of sofa, that’s nothing to sneeze at.) A coupon code was provided to get the 10%.
I went through the entire online order process with reasonable ease until I reached the end. At each step of the process, I expected an opportunity to use to coupon code, but it never materialized.
When I received the e-mail confirmation, no discount had been applied, and so for $140 I was willing to get on the phone and call.
After 45 minutes on hold (Is there a better argument for ordering online?) I got through to a very helpful operator who informed me that the 10% discount only applied to Ikea Online when you call on the phone. Their online ordering system can’t handle discounts.
They were at a critical juncture at this point and could have failed miserably when I said, “I’m on the phone to you now.”
And, sure enough, they gave me the discount; however, they had to cancel my old order and place the order again.
One minor snag, my order hadn’t shown up in the computer yet, (another shortcoming of their computer system) so they told me not to worry, just ignore any e-mail I might get about the first order. That wasn’t too comforting and visions of 2 sofa sets on Christmas morning were dancing through my head.
When the order was complete, I was given an estimated delivery date of December 21. I figured if they showed up on the 21st, it would be a bit early, but Irene would be able to show off for the party she was holding on the 24th.
Unfortunately, Irene finally decided that we just had to purchase the sofa before her party and I had to spill the beans. The secret wouldn’t have lasted because the bill showed up on the credit card statement long before the 21st.
The 21st came and went and the sofa set didn’t arrive. Irene, impatient, called Ikea only to find out that our order had been cancelled.
Why? Because we hadn’t paid.
When Irene pointed out that our credit card had been charged, they said, “Oh, yeah, that happens sometimes with our order system. I’ll put the order back in for you.”
Why do they bother to even have a computer system? It’s certainly not to reduce the amount of work their staff has to do, or that we had to do for that matter.
There was no way we’d get it before Christmas, but they did credit us back the delivery charges and “expedited” the order so we’d get it in about 1 week.
Needless to say, that was 2 weeks ago, but it did finally arrive today. The order was right, we ultimately paid less than we’d have paid at the Ikea store and delivery was free.
Despite all that, the best part is that both sections are big enough that I can stretch out. Ahhhhhhh.
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