Complaint Review: samsclub.com - Internet

On Sept 19^th midday, I placed an order for a Serta Roma Premium Memory Foam Mattress -King.  As is still on the page, the delivery time is estimated at 10-12 business day.  Later that say, I received a phone call from Home Direct USA saying that they received notification of the order for delivery, that I should expect a call in 2-3 business days from the delivery terminal, and that I should call the terminal directly if I had not heard anything after 3 days. Other than that, nothing was indicated that something was wrong.

Then I heard nothing.

On Sept 26^th, I received an email from Sam’s Club that said my order was shipped.  Sweet. I thought it was a little weird that Home Direct said that I should get a call in 2-3 days to schedule the delivery, but that it didn’t ship for a week later. But whatever. There was a convenient link in the email that went to a broken webpage.  Uh oh.  I still managed to figure out how to get to track my order with Home Direct.  Except the order only said that it had been processed, not that it had been picked up or any subsequent steps. Thinking maybe they are waiting on me for something since I never called them back to schedule a delivery, I called the local distribution center.  They were closed and I only received a friendly but not very helpful answering service. I had to wait until Monday, Sept 29^th.

Monday Sept 29^th, I called the distribution center in case they were waiting on me.  They weren’t.  They hadn’t received my mattress yet, but said it was scheduled to get to them that day and hopefully I should receive a call later.  I didn’t.  The same thing happened on Tuesday, Sept 30^th.  Same excuse, it was supposed to be in but wasn’t.  On Wednesday, Sept 30^th, they said that they never received any paperwork on it and told me to contact Home Direct to see what the issue is.   So I gave Home Direct a call.  They said they would research it and get back to me what the deal was as they showed that it was scheduled to be delivered at the terminal on the 29^th. I received no phone call.

I called Home Direct on October 3rd again, talked with the same individual. Again I got the same response, let me contact someone and I’ll get back with you.  Never received a phone call back.  I’m starting to realize a pattern at this point. Frustrated at the complete lack of communication from anyone, I contacted samsclub.com’s customer support.  I was told that something did indeed look wrong with the order status, was reminded that technically the mattress had until October 8^th to be delivered, but that they would send an email to Sam’s Club’s Logistics department to see what was up.  I specifically asked if this was Home Direct as they likely would just get the same response.  They affirmed that it was not Home Direct and that it was an actual Sam’s Club department. I know it likely will come as a surprise, but I never got a call back.

It was also on October 3^rd that I found the Serta Pro Tracker link on the product page.  It took me a few tries to figure out what number was supposed to go where as my order information didn’t work, but I eventually managed to figure it out.  Sweet!  It’s all the information on the status of my order.  Sure would have been nice to have this a while back but whatever. I see that my order was received by Serta’s system on 9/19 at 10:59 AM and then sent to the plant a few seconds later.  I also see that the plant received my order at 11:02 AM that same day, and that it was scheduled to ship on 9/29.  Everything looks right for the way that it was supposed to be…except it was October 3^rd at this point.  It didn’t say it was in production.  It didn’t say it was shipped.  Uh oh.  Something’s wrong.  It was the end of day at this point and I knew I wouldn’t reach someone who could really help me until business hours Monday, so I waited.  I still was technically a few days away from the expected delivery period, so maybe there was a glitch in the matrix and things weren’t just updating.

On Monday, October 6^th, I made I think my 7^th call to someone.  I got a nice lady who said that she would email her contact with the manufacturer that that they usually get back to her really fast, like in 15 minutes.  Or maybe at most an hour.  I was told I would be emailed when the rep got a reply back. I got a reference number this time so that when I called back and said no one ever contacted me that they could refer to my previous call.  That reference number is XXXXXXXXXX. Sure enough, never got a call or email back.  Now I must say that up to this point, I was actually pretty ok with the complete lack of care on anyone’s part.  I work with others in customer support and I realize that standard operating procedure is to listen to what the irate customer says, find out what will pacify them, and then tell them whatever that is so that you can get off that call and onto the next. I get that.

Later on the 6^th, I call back again since no one called me.  I thought maybe, just maybe someone got a reply back from Serta (or whoever they were expecting not to receive a reply from). Of course no one knew what I was talking about but I did get to talk to a very apologetic Joann or Joanna at extension 2071. After literally receiving over 30 minutes of apologies for not receiving my order  or having to put me on hold for most of that period, I was told that Serta was closed and that no one could be contacted to see what exactly was up. For just a very brief moment, I actually thought I got a hold of a real human that had compassion and really felt sorry that I had been jerked around so long.  She couldn’t really help, but said to call back today after 11 central time, give her extension and name and she would help me out again so I didn’t have to repeat the same story for the 9^th time.

This morning, October 7^th, I wake up to check the status of my order on the Serta Pro Tracker.  Lo and behold, I see not one, not two, but THREE orders out there although it looks like the first two are just duplicates. The 3^rd order is a new one and it has a submission date of 5:25. Not sure what time zone that is for so it was either send during my call with Joann or after I got off the phone, but either way maybe I actually got through to someone who could do something sometime during the day Yesterday. VICTORY! Wait…does that mean my 10-12 business days gets reset and I’ll now have to wait a week for it to be delivered? 

So I call just a little bit ago and ask to speak to Joann so I can get to the bottom of it.  Except no one answers at that extension.  And my new rep says he’s not supposed to transfer people. Great.  I get to repeat the story yet again.  So I try to go through it one last time.  The rep puts me on hold and talks with whoever and comes back and says that it technically wasn’t supposed to be delivered until tomorrow blah blah blah but yeah the order was resubmitted as the manufacturer had a problem.  They ran out of supplies.

W. T. F.

So it has taken over two weeks of waiting, reaching my delivery period, for someone to actually tell me that Serta, the largest manufacturer in the country ran out of supplies for an order to the largest retailer in the world? Bull s**t.  Not that they had production problems.  I understand that. I work for a manufacturer and I know there are issues.  But it was the lies, the lack of communications, never hearing back, etc that’s the problem.

So I asked the rep does that mean that my ship date isn’t going to be tomorrow? I knew the answer, but I just wanted to confirm that.  And he did but without actually saying that.  And the best that he could do was say it probably would be another 1-2 weeks. At that point I was told that it would take 2-3 days for my order to be canceled and 10-15 days for my money to be refunded onto my credit card.  It was at that moment that I blew my top and slammed the phone down in utter disgust at the whole situation.

Now I write all the above not because I’m pissed off (I am), or that I’m disappointed in the complete lack of support (I am as well). I just wanted to write it down so that I’ll have a record as to why I’m requesting/confirming the following things that I told the rep on my last call

1. Order XXXXXXXXXX should be cancelled. I don’t want the Serta Roma Premium Memory Foam 10” Mattress – King.  I don’t want the original one that I ordered that Serta can’t seem to squeeze out a few more pounds of viscoelastic foam, and I don’t want the subsequent one that was reordered now that maybe Serta did get some foam in.  Kinda weird how they couldn’t just resume the old order that they had to submit a completely new one. Makes you wonder if I was lied too again…but that wouldn’t ever happen.
2. My membership, membership XXXXXXXXX, needs to be canceled and my full membership fee that I actually just renewed for this purchase to be refunded.

I know that I’m not Sam’s Club most valued member.  My family has been a member for the last decade or so most of the time and while we didn’t shop there very frequently, we did enjoy or service usually.  And on one former occasion, I did greatly appreciate the service I received for an extended warranty issue that wasn’t resolving to my satisfaction.  But this experience left a really sour taste in my mouth.  And with a Costco opening recently that’s been begging for my service, I think it’s time to change who I do business with.  It does give me satisfaction knowing that instead of the dozen or so people I’ve told of my great previous experience, I’ll know there will be even more people that I’ll tell of the atrocious experience I just had.