Lesson learned. And that lesson would be "never buy furniture online."
This is the desk I'd ordered for our new home office/library: http://furniturefromhome.com/products/Traditional/Grand-Home-Office-Desk-Hutch-Bookcase-Cabinet-furniture-coa800510.
And these are the bookcases we ordered: http://furniturefromhome.com/products/Wood/phdav-1. I don't know which bookcases they're listing at $3,599. Those aren't the ones we got. Still, this furniture wasn't cheap.
Point is, we waited five weeks for this furniture to arrive, and when it finally did on Sunday... The bookcases were damaged, with big chunks taken out of the bases. And the measurements the website had give for the desk were off by an inch, so my computer CPU didn't fit in the CPU cabinet of the desk. It in fact stood well ABOVE the top of the cabinet so that the top of the desk itself would have had to sit on the top of my computer!
Add to that the fact that everyone with whom I spoke at this online company gave me different descriptions of these pieces, and when I finally found a woman who claimed to have seen the desk up close, she said it was gorgeous and that the CPU cabinet actually rolled out for easy access to your computer. Sounds great, right?
Problem is, the desk doesn't really look like it does in those photos. It looks much smaller, and much more like a cheap prop than a gorgeous desk. And that CPU cabinet? Not only is it smaller than the website says it is, but it does not roll out for easy access.
I was also told that I had to tell them at the time of the order how many bookcases we wanted because the rolling bar for the ladder was one piece, and they needed to know how long it had to be. Of course, when the bookcases arrived, each piece had its own individual segment of bar, which means the ladder would fall off the bar if the bookcases were at all misaligned.
I was, it goes without saying, furious. We told the deliverymen to pack it all back onto the truck. We weren't keeping it.
Of course NOW, Furniture From Home, the site that claims "prompt, friendly service" was suddenly hard to get ahold of. When I told them I wanted a full refund, they said they charged a 15% "restocking" fee. I told them I didn't feel I should have to pay to restock damaged furniture. I also told them that since there were factual problems with the furniture that directly contradicted both what I had been told on the phone and what was on the website, that I didn't want to pay ANYTHING, since had I know the truth I wouldn't have bought the furnture in the first place.
My complaints were finally passed on to someone in the Claims department (seriously. At this point I was wondering whether I'd mistakenly purchased furniture from an insurance company) who called me last night and revealed himself to be... The co-owner of the company.
He went on to tell me that if things arrive broken, they can repair them and send them back (as if! Keep in mind it would then take another month or more for this repaired furniture to arrive!) But that if I wanted to wash my hands of the matter, then the best he could do was a 7.5% restocking fee, because, he said, they had to recoup some of the money they'd lost in shipping this furniture. His partner, he said, wanted to go ahead and charge me the full 15% fee, but this guy was willing to bring it down to 7.5%, because he likes "to work with the customer." He also claimed that every piece of furniture is supposed to be closely inspected before shipment.
I insisted that this was their fault, that I was given bad information, that the furniture was not what I thought it was going to be, and that it was CLEARLY not inspected beforehand. Why should I pay ANYTHING for their mistake?
Ah, well. At the end of the day I agreed to pay the 7.5%, which still pisses me off. The more I think about it, the angrier I get that this company is so inept, fraudulent and mismanaged. And that I'm out $300 now because THEY screwed up.
So take from my plight these words of wisdom: don't buy furniture online unless you have seen it with your own eyes first. And whatever you do, NEVER buy anything from furniturefromhome.com. Their stuff looks great on the site, but they will screw you over.
And if they're a small enough company that they'll screw a customer over just for $300, then they are a small enough company that they can be severely impacted by negative reviews and word of mouth. So pass it on.
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