The One In Which JC Penney Earns My Scorn

Back in late November, we ordered a dresser for the kids room from JC Penney’s. In order to save some money on shipping, we opted to have it delivered to the store. First mistake.

Couple weeks go by and then my wife gets an automated phone call telling her that the dresser has arrived at the store and is ready for pick up. I should point out that this is just a few weeks before Christmas. So I go down to the store to pick it up. I wait in a line for customer service and then tell them what I’m here for. The lady takes the information and goes to the back.

For the next hour I stand there, watching as the only other customer service person deals with an ever building line of irrate christmas shoppers. I can’t help but feel sorry for her. The one helping me returns a few times to check her computer and then disappears again. Eventually, she hands me off to their warehouse manager and I learn that their computer says that the dresser is there, but there is no actual dresser in existence.

At this point, I’m tired of waiting so when they say they need to wait for the person whose an expert on their ordering system to come in later that day, I just nod happily and go home. Despite a promise to call me with an answer later, they never do. A few more days go by and my wife stops by there on her way home from work to check on it’s status. They tell her the dresser is there, so she calls me to come pick it up. I arrive, and run into the same problem. Computer says its there, but its not actually there.

This time, the lady in charge of this system is there so she makes some phone calls and learns that the dresser was never actually shipped from their warehouse. She assures us that is is now shipped and will be arriving in about a week. They’ll call us when it gets in.

So we go off to my parents for Christmas, leaving after they promised it should be there, and return home a week later, now two weeks after they said it would definitely be in and a month after we ordered it. We try one more time to call and find out what is going on. The guy my wife talks to (I would have been much more rude if I had called) says he will look into and call us later that day.

Now, so far they have never called us back like promised, so it was little surprise when he didn’t call us back later that day.  But much to our surprise he does call back the next day and informs us that the dresser needs to be reordered and should be here in a few weeks. Since we are now in January, and the baby’s due in February we’re starting to hit a deadline. We would like to have the room semi-organized before the birth. And we need a dresser in order to have someplace to put stuff.

So we cancel the order and have now ordered a new one from Target (spending $30 more for a look we don’t like as much. Alternatively we could have spent $200 more somewhere else for one we like the look of better). JC Penney had, of course, charged our credit card back in early December when the dresser had supposedly first shipped. Fortunately, they did process the refund pretty quickly so we at least have our money back.

So, never ordering something and asking for in store pick up again. And never ordering anything, period, from JC Penney.