Ready for a rant?
For Frugal Friday I had this whole post planned on “lower your expectations” as a frugal tip.
Instead, I’m just going to rant and rave about how Wal-Mart (may have, almost) ruined my kids birthday party, all because Darrel and I decided to lower our expectations and buy a swing set from Wal-Mart instead of a more expensive place.
With FPIES and our other assorted food issues, we can’t really “do” birthday parties the way most people do them. The birthday cake isn’t going to be a centerpiece of the day, we can’t really do a BBQ with lots of yummy grilled treats, and frankly, that kind of sucks.
Last year the boys didn’t have much of a birthday celebration, so we really want to make their 2nd and 4th birthday party Special. Since the food can’t be the focus (awesome birthday cakes were a tradition in my house growing up that I want to eventually continue for the boys), Darrel and I were thrilled that we were finally going to be able to get the boys an awesome, totally cool Swing Set.
The Swing Set would be the focus of the party! The kids won’t even notice the lack of traditional party food fare because they’ll be too busy playing! Win!
We had it all planned out: Darrel was going to till up a large section of yard, level it out with a rake, and cover it with mulch. The swing set would go there, along with the boys sand table, and a new plastic kiddie pool for fun summertime water play.
Two years ago, when we first wanted to buy a swing set, we found a great little company that makes high quality sets, and picked out a swing set that was so cool it made ME want to climb on and play!
But it cost almost $2,000.
Even with me back at work, that’s a little out of our price range at the moment.
So we decided to be frugal, and settled on a swing set we found at Wal-mart.com that looked really nice. It had monkey bars, a playhouse on the second level, a 10 foot slide, two swings, and a riding glider. Oh, and a rock wall.
And it was only $650. With free shipping to the store. Score!
We placed the order on May 23rd, plenty of time for the swing set to be shipped to our local store and for us to get it installed for the boys joint birthday party on June 21st.
Tuesday of last week, I received an email saying it was in the store and ready for pick-up. We planned to borrow a pickup truck to retrieve it over the weekend.
Friday afternoon, though, I received another email from Wal-mart. One of the boxes was damaged and had been returned to the manufacturer – and I had been refunded HALF the money of the swing set! If I still wanted the swing set, I was advised to go online and order it again.
Um…okay, but how do I order HALF a swing set?
So I tried to call Wal-mart.com to ask an operator exactly what I was supposed to do.
Do you know, I couldn’t find a single phone number for Wal-mart on their website. My only option was to email them.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I’m on a time crunch, here, folks!
So I called the local store to see if they could help me.
To their credit, I got a person right away instead of having to “push 5” on a computer prompt. She was very nice, and immediately transferred me to their “Ship to Store” department.
After twelve minutes on hold, and the FIFTH TIME I was bounced back to the operator, I asked to speak with a manager.
Another 8 minutes on hold, and I finally got one.
He was very nice, as well, and was just as confused about my order as I was. Unfortunately, he really could do nothing to help me, as I’d placed my order with Wal-mart.com and the ‘online store’ and the ‘in person stores’ are totally different entities.
What he did do was give me a phone number to contact the .com store…and promise to go kick some heinie in the “Ship to Store” department for not answering their phones!
So I called the number he gave me and quickly got another very nice person on the phone.
He flat out told me that somebody had screwed up; if one box of a shipment is damaged, it is supposed to be returned and replaced – not refunded.
Unfortunately, once a refund is issued, it cannot be cancelled. The best he could do was to refund the rest of the order and let me go place my order a second time.
Great.
Guess what, folks? Wal-mart.com refunds don’t happen instantly! We didn’t have enough limit left on the credit card (thanks to FPIES expenses) to order a second swing set until the refund processed. Or we got creative.
So we shuffled money over the weekend and sent an extra payment to the credit card so we’d have enough room to order the swing set again.
The very day I got the “return/refund” email from Wal-Mart, we got a call from Best Buy: our freezer was ready for delivery.
Last month, we realized that the summer meant lots of in season foods – which means lots of preserving foods to last a whole year for Zac! I love dehydrating, but not everything dehydrates well, and some things are just easier or better frozen.
And with whole cows, goats milk, and pigs in our freezer, we were running out of freezer space.
So we bought a new freezer, but it took a month for delivery.
One problem: I hadn’t cleaned off the porch to make room for the new freezer! So the day after we got our swing set refund-that-hadn’t-shown-up-yet, I went storage shed shopping.
Ruh-roh! Storage shed noob that I am, I didn’t realize we were going to have to build a whole foundation for the thing! I saw the cost of this little project increasing by the minute, and made a judgement call: we’re getting a tiny little shed that I saw at Wal-Mart a month ago. It would be large enough to get the big stuff off the porch, and cheap enough that if the lack of a foundation ruined it, I wouldn’t be too chagrined.
Problem solved, right?
WRONG.
I asked the nice man at Wal-mart to bring up a boxed shed for me.
FORTY FIVE minutes later, he remembered to tell me that they “have it in stock, but can’t find a boxed one anywhere”. Oh, but I could take home the display if I wanted to. (You know, the one whose door wouldn’t open?)
Uh, nope. I asked him if he could call another Wal-mart and ask if they had one in the box.
Y’all, he didn’t know how to dial out on the phone! After five minutes of him asking other employees how to do it, I finally pulled out my cell phone, looked up the number, and called the store myself.
Ten minutes of hold time later and “Nope. We don’t have one. You can have the display, though, if you want.”
ARGH!
In the end, Darrel and I did some major trashing and shuffling on our porch to make room for the new freezer. No storage shed at all, though it could be dearly useful right now.
Despite their continued incompetence, the cheap price of the swing set continued to call to me, and Monday I went back to Wal-Mart.com to order it the second time and…I couldn’t.
It’s there; pretty pictures and everything. But nowhere to click to BUY the dratted thing!
Back to the 800 number the store manager gave me! I spoke to another very nice lady who spent 30 minutes on the phone with me, and even got another agent involved…and neither of them could figure it out.
THEY couldn’t even place the order for me! Usually, she told me, when an item is out of stock it says “Out of Stock” where the order button is located. If it is discontinued, the entire listing is removed from the website.
Neither of those things have happened for this swing set, but there is still no way to order it.
Oh, and even if we were able to order it last Monday, it can take up to 10 business days for the shipment to arrive…which means it might not arrive until after the boys birthday party!
NOT OK.
Now, I know that bashing Wal-mart is a popular past time in the interwebs. I’m not a huge fan of the company, myself, long before this “ruining my sons birthday party” and “can’t do my job” debacle.
But this is where it gets REALLY good: I live in Northwest Arkansas – the HEADQUARTERS of Wal-mart, Inc.
And last week, while all this rotten customer service was happening to me was their Shareholder’s Week. Our town was overrun with Wal-mart investors! Every store was sparkling clean, every employee on their best behavior, doing everything they could to convince the investors they’d invested wisely.
And STILL this all happened.
I’d say that I would boycott Wal-mart (I did it successfully for two years prior to marrying Darrel and moving here), but thanks to this being the International HQ of the company, there just aren’t a lot of alternative shopping options in the area.
Off the top of my head, I can think of six Wal-marts within an hour of my house, but only two Targets.
There is one piddly, awful, dingy Toys ‘R Us, and NO Babies ‘R Us. (I did most of my baby prep buying online.)
So boycotting Wal-mart completely isn’t really a doable option for me, due to a lack of alternative buying options in my area for many things.
Still, Darrel managed to find an almost identical swing set at Sears.com that we ordered for the boys. It cost us almost $200 more than the one we wanted at Wal-mart, but I’ll bet that money that I won’t have nearly the problems with it!
It could still take 8-10 business days to arrive, though, which means we STILL might not have a Swing Set for the boys birthday party.
No cool cake. No traditional birthday foods cookout. And now, possibly no really cool gift for my sons. (Thank goodness it was a surprise and they weren’t expecting it!)
Isn’t it enough that FPIES and food allergies/intolerances have spoiled so many things for my boys?? Now Wal-Mart’s incompetence has to take away even MORE from them?!
Yeah. I’m seriously ticked off, y’all.
So Wal-Mart (almost, may have) ruined my kids birthday party, and lost over $1,000 in sales from my family in a single weeks time.
And as many more sales as I can manage to send to other businesses and NOT Wal-Mart for the rest of my life. Why Yes, I DO hold a grudge. Don’t mess with my babies!
As far as a Frugal Friday tip goes, it IS worthwhile to lower your expectations.
But that doesn’t mean you let yourself be treated like crap while doing it.
Sometimes you can’t go as cheap as you would like. The stress and hassle just isn’t worth the savings.
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What’s your worst shopping experience?
