Complaint Review: Fingerhut

I hope that this post will be a warning to everyone about Fingerhut's false advertising, and bait and switch tactics. Let my bad experience help you and do not buy anything from Fingerhut if you want to avoid having to tell your child that Santa Claus is not coming this year.

We made the mistake of ordering some Christmas gifts that were guaranteed in stock and guaranteed to be delivered by Christmas. This was on 12/15. Plenty of time to get to their destination right? 10 days? I feel like the Seinfeld episode about the rental car reservation. "They know how to give a guarantee, they just don't know how to keep the guarantee". Their website, where we ordered from, showed the items we ordered in stock, and guaranteed prominently that if we ordered before the 18th the order was guaranteed to arrive before Christmas. When the order was processed the status on the print out listed the items in stock and ordered to be delivered before Christmas. We checked on the order status yesterday and saw that one of the toys, our child is believing Santa Claus will bring, is now out of order with no expected delivery date. When we called customer service we waited on hold for quite a while, then someone who could barely speak English apologized and basically kept repeating "I'm sorry" over and over. When we asked to speak to a manager, we were put on hold for 30 minutes then were hung up on. No resolution. "Well, at least we're getting some of the gifts" we thought, "we'll follow up again tomorrow when we have more time".  Today when checking the status of our order, we saw that all the other gifts showed an arrival date after Christmas. This, after the items were shown as arriving before 12/25 on our order status up until now. Calling them to complain was again very frustrating and fruitless. No English speaking people, and I don't mean English with an accent. I grew up in New York City, I can understand people with even very bad accents, and I'm tri-lingual. I could not understand half of what the person was saying, I had to keep asking the woman I spoke to to keep repeating what she was saying. No resolution again, just "I'm very sorry". Once again I was hung up on when put on hold to tallk to a manager. One time I'll let go, but it seems like this is an established procedure that Fingerhut has for complaint resolution. Hold them off long enough, frustrate the customer and then they'll give up and go away. Fingerhut..with a name like that I should have had some foreshadowing. They sure gave us and our 6 yr old the finger, and I'm sure we're not the only ones. I have no idea what their guarantee means, because if it was a true guarantee, they would make sure they come through on it. We did not even get an email letting us know that they were reneging on their guarantee. If we hadn't checked the status we would have never known. We could have ordered through any no name retailers and probably would have received our gifts with no problems. We thought Fingerhut was a well known brand, and thought we had found a good price on the items we decided to order through their site. We now cannot get the toys that our child wanted before Christmas, since they are no longer in stock at the other retailers, and if we found the items somewhere else they cannot get to us without overnight shipping charges. Unfortunately we cannot afford this with our limited means this year. Fingerhut has become the Grinch who stole Christmas for this family. I hope this post will prevent another family or child from being burned by this company, with no integrity, in the future.