IKEA lost a sale yesterday.
Last Thursday, I ordered a couple of desks for the home office redesign with delivery January 2nd. Instead I woke that day to a notice from their 3rd party delivery company that the items weren’t ready when it arrived at the warehouse to pick them up and there would be no delivery.
I called IKEA customer service, but the best they would offer was to reschedule for Saturday with a delivery window from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
I asked if I could come pick it up that day. Nope. They couldn’t switch it from a delivery to a pick-up, and if I canceled and reordered for pickup, I wouldn’t be able to get a spot the same day.
Unless I was willing to accept a 5-day delay or drive a minimum 2-hour / 65 mile round trip to pick it up myself on a work day later in the week, I was putting my home office revamp schedule HEAVILY at risk. I think I’ve mentioned my wife is going to an art retreat, which will give me three days to mess the house up as much as I want as I deconstruct and reconstruct my home office.
Unless those desks arrived first thing Saturday morning, I’d be hard-pressed to get them assembled and get all the equipment arranged and rewired before I had to have the house back to a less chaotic state.
I let them reschedule, found a couple of reasonably comparable pieces Amazon could deliver on Thursday (I’ll pay $30 more and lose 1.7 square feet of surface space), ordered those, and canceled the IKEA order for Saturday.
If you mess up my delivery, “we’ll try again in 5 days” is not a satisfactory option to fix it. I expect a bit more of a sense of urgency or a gesture of apology if you can’t be urgent. They offered neither. They instead expected me to reschedule a home improvement project around their convenience, because they didn’t have their shit together.
I cancelled that Saturday delivery not because I no longer wanted those tables. But I feel IKEA cannot be trusted to meet their commitments and cannot be trusted to make an honest effort to fix things if they fail to meet them. Yes, everybody makes mistakes, but if you do not go above and beyond to fix your mistakes, the mistakes count against you.