Unfiltered Story #299098

For reasons, my wife prefers to make most of her clothes herself, so she does a lot of sewing. Since her sewing machine was starting to wear down, she decided to buy a new one from her savings at the start of this year.

Shortly after ordering it, she got a phone call from the company. They told her it would take a bit longer than usual, due to things like the pandemic and Brexit. Fine, a few more weeks longer isn’t a big thing and these things happen. My wife even thanked them for telling her in advance.

How wrong she was.

Weeks went by without the thing arriving. They kept informing her, by E-mail, that the machine was on its way, but that it took longer than expected due to shortage and slow transports. When the ship ‘Ever Given’ got stuck in the Suez Canal, this was of course a famous disruption of global trade, so she was informed this was another delay. That was late March.

After that, April came and went. Near half May, my wife got another message about the delivery being delayed, but with the assurance that it would arrive next week. Being quite fed-up, she e-mailed them back, pointing out that she had received the promise that it would arrive “next week” for months now and that she couldn’t understand why it kept taking longer and longer.

Their answer? Well, she had to understand that there was a worldwirde shortage in the kind of sewing machine she had ordered. Their explanation even made clear that the machine had not been on its way for the last months at all, since it still had to be produced. They offered her the option of a refund or to buy a different machine from them on a discount. When she told me, I was so appalled that I advised her to never do business with them again.

Indeed she didn’t feel like ordering another product from them, since she felt completely cheated. She decided to take the refund and started to look into nearby shops selling sewing machines… only to find out that almost every shop selling sewing machines in our part of the country was owned by this same chain.

Don’t sell products you don’t have! And if you do, don’t keep your customers in suspense for months. It’s not only dubious and careless, it’s also completely weird.