I made the mistake of ordering 9 mini cupcake tins from Wal Mart site to store. They accepted my order, processed it, charged my account. Then sent an email canceling 4 of the tins I ordered. I called the store and they said they didn't have that many tins.
I still don't know why site to store sent me there. I was told it was because the store's inventory showed they had 9 tins.
So I cancelled the entire order. The point was to get everything at one location.
I had the store call a second store to see if they had enough tins to get my order to 9. They told me the second store did.
So I went to the second store first. Since the original store supposedly was holding 5 for me at my request (no longer as part of the site to store order), it made sense to just pick up 4 at the first stop. I did.
I went on to the second store to get the other five. I was waiting more than 30 minutes trying to get help in the site to store area where I was to pick up the 5 that they were holding for me. When I finally got some attention, it seemed, they had not held 5. They had 2 (and one of them had something wrong with it) and then there were three others that looked entirely different. So I bought 1 and asked them to call a third store. The third store said yes, they had four of this item (brand name and model number identified).
When I got to the third store, they only had three. The fourth one was the wrong model and brand. They kept trying to tell me it was the same. It clearly was not. So I bought the three. Now I am up to 8.
Instead of calling the fourth store (since it takes an average of 14 minutes a call to WalMart to get any information at all, I just drove over). I bought the last tin at the fourth store.
I did not keep track of the miles I drove, or the gas I wasted. But I did note that this process of site to store, took 2 1/2 hours from the time I left the house to pick up the first tins, til I returned.
I know I'll get my money back, because I gave WalMart a headache on the phone at site to store. But who's going to return my 2 1/2 hours in the car driving all over town?
Site to store is clearly a case of lack of communication. The people who list the item online and direct you to a store have no idea (no matter what they tell you) of how many of that product is available in that store, or whether it is available there at all. The people at the store don't know what's going on, they're just in the middle of the order. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. It's a comedy of errors that isn't very funny.
Next time, I'll let my eyes just scoot on by the site to store sign and call up the store and hang on the phone for 14 minutes and find out whether they have the item I want or not.