The Walmart.com Fiasco

Hopefully none of you work for walmart.com (I don’t have a problem per say with the stores, just the website) but if you do, I hope you weren’t unfortunate enough to have dealt with me.

I ordered a big toy for my precious little baby, an exersaucer activity center and had arranged for it to be sent to my local store. I had used that very convenient site-to-store ordering option many times & never had a problem…until then. I was given an estimated arrival date, which in the past was always an overestimate & my items would come in early. When the item had not arrived by the due date I started to get antsy. I tracked the order & it said “in transit”..okay I can live with that. Every day thereafter I checked & it continually said “in transit”..now mind you that this was “in transit” from Tennessee to Georgia.

After a week I emailed customer service about the order & was given an autoresponse with directions for tracking my order (I really hate autoresponses). I then sent another email asking to be contacted by a real person & they told me the same thing, that it was in transit & to wait a couple more days.

By this time I was really getting pissed but I did as I was told & waited 3 more days which happened to fall on a weekend (almost 6 weeks after I placed the order). I had finally had enough & sent a rather nasty email demanding to know where my item was, just how the hell it could possibly take 2 weeks to make a 150 mile trip from Tenn. to GA, and that I had better be contancted by a person.

I was promptly answered by yet another real person who finally admitted to me that my order was “lost” somewhere..this is a big box, like 4ft x 4ft.. hard to lose in my opinion..I was so angry by this time that I could have thrown my computer out the door.

They offered to either reorder the stupid thing or give me a refund. I opted for the refund which was initially purchased on a gift card..yet another pain in my ass. I was given directions for getting a refund for a gift card which was to call a different walmart department & give them my order number & that they would take care of it.

Keep in mind that this was on a Sat., so when I called about my refund they didn’t answer..all I got was a recording that said “please call back during normal business hours”..wth! Don’t bother to tell me what those normal business hours might be. I emailed them back yet again to tell them what had happened & that I was very upset & had lost all faith in walmart.com and sadly to say that I would never use the site-to-store service again.

I was a little dramatic, I know, but I wanted that toy for my baby! I felt so anxious, like she was going to be developmentally slowed by not having it right then.

Now, if that wasn’t icing on the cake..they sent me a customer service satisfaction survey and man did I let them have it. I put extremely dissatisfied on every question and told them that they need to have more real people answering emails, not the stupid computer.

Needless to say that Monday morning I did get my refund and have since bought the toy from the store. It wasn’t the exact one I wanted but I was not waiting another day on those people.