Call it confirmation bias. Call it one associate attorney’s attempt to justify her desire to leave the office at a reasonable hour and ignore her email on weekends so she can spend time with her kids do whatever she damn well pleases. Call it whatever you want, but this is a fantastic article about the history of the death of the 40-hour work week and the science behind why this is new norm is terrible for both companies and society.
Tchotchke? Isn’t that what they called the guy on Happy Days?
Under normal circumstances, I would not air my grievances in this sacred venue that is my blog. However, there is only so much corporate stupidity and poor customer service a person can take. And besides, this company is specifically asking for it, so here I go…
Dear Sleep Country,
Please allow me to explain why I would buy a mattress anywhere else*: your delivery system sucks.
To start, receiving a phone call at 8:40pm to tell me what 2 hour block of time you will be arriving the following day is not a sufficient amount of time to allow anyone to rearrange their day to accommodate your schedule. And not being able to change this delivery time is annoying, but far less annoying than the fact that you never once inquired what time might be most convenient for me while selling me a mattress.
Second, when I ask to reschedule the delivery for a different day, giving me a time frame of 3pm-1opm is not useful. Even less useful is reassuring me that I will receive a phone call the night before narrowing that time frame down to a 2 hour window… which cannot be changed.
Do you see where this is going? I’ll help because the guy in your warehouse, though very friendly, didn’t get it. It’s an endless cycle of you telling me what day you can deliver my mattress and then waiting until the last minute to inform me when its actually arriving. I sit around, hoping each night that you randomly choose a time that isn’t directly in the middle of my day. And if you don’t, I reschedule for a totally different day and we start the process over again.
This is the paragraph where an angry letter would say something like “As someone who spent as much money on her mattress as she did on her wedding, I expect better customer service!” But sadly this says more about my wedding than it does about my mattress choices. So, I’m going to substitute this paragraph with the following one:
When it comes to delivery, you should try to be more like Comcast. Yep, I said it. Comcast. I’ll let that sink in for a second as I’m sure the news your company does something worse than Comcast has to be quite the shock. Comcast gets away with having abysmal customer service because it has a monopoly on cable and internet in, coincidentally, every neighborhood I’ve ever lived in. But they have also managed to come up with a system that allows their customers to schedule installations at a their convenience through this thing called The Internet. You should check it out. Until then, if you’re going to taunt customers with your slogan, you should make it a lot more difficult for them to come up with a reason to go elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Angry Customer
P.S. Comcast, don’t get to full of yourself. You and I will do battle another day. Again.
*For those of you who don’t know this reference, Sleep Country has a totally obnoxious jingle (the third most recognized jingle in the PacNW, I was told) that you can never unhear.
