Forget chivalry, service is dead; words and cold hard cash are the only fix.
You haven’t heard anything from me around here lately because I’ve been testing recipes, studying the gut microbiome, and documenting it on The Plant Milk Project all the while working on a new project for people who want to write their way out of crippling debt, sinking businesses, or maybe just a one-year-old’s birthday party.
Today I’m talking about neither your innards’ health nor how to use words to accomplish almost anything. Today’s post is an exposé of sorts.
My husband, though not perfect, is as chivalrous as they come. He opens doors and pulls out chairs and washes the 7,492 dishes I use to make dinner every night. He buys flowers just because and takes us blueberry picking on the weekends. So, if you think is chivalry is dead, you may want to ease up on your Tinder profile’s feminist manifesto, let the world know you wouldn’t mind a guy who spontaneously buys you flowers, and turn your focus to what’s really wrong with the world: customer service.
Exposing those who wrong you is not what the good Lord taught us to do, but—in my defense—he never spent four thousand dollars on an oven only to have his cheap laminate flooring scratched and his favorite rug stained beyond laundering.
Ok, that sounded pettier than I expected, but there is nothing more enraging than spending a stupid amount of money on an appliance that does not peel, cut, cook, and serve dinner while you’re doing something meaningful like taking a nap.
We ordered an oven in December of 2021. If in the last 18 months you’ve ordered anything that doesn’t come from Amazon Prime, you may know where this is going.
Four months later:
Best Buy sent us an email to let us know our oven would be delivered in just a few days. We rejoiced over the fact that we would no longer have to hold our oven closed with a barstool and risk burning the house down every night just to feed our family.
Four months and three days later:
Best Buy sent us an email to let us know our oven delivery would be delayed—until August. Totally suspicious that a FIVE MONTH DELAY was not on your radar when you reminded us of our delivery THREE DAYS AGO. They tried to play it off with a casual email like an overwhelmed working mom trying to reschedule a coffee date with a good friend. Can I catch you in August?
No. Just no.
The fire hazard I use to make dinner every night is kind of a big problem, but the world is not what it used to be. Appliances are scarce; bar stools are still readily available in most counties, so as a former Best Buy customer service rep, I opted not to take my frustration out on some 21-year-old just trying to pay her way through bar hopping. We kept our order in place but started browsing for ovens that might be in stock before our house burns down in the middle of a walnut loaf.
Four months and five days later:
Best Buy called to inform us our oven was never coming. “But, we do have this other model we can deliver by June,” Camilo* told my husband, Jerod, “but, to be honest, that probably won’t actually be delivered by June.”
He offered to match the price on our original oven order (#RIP) and told us if we decided to upgrade again, they would try to work with us on price to compensate for the saga. Possibly getting an oven in June was better than possibly getting an oven in August, so we upgraded, and when yet another oven became available even sooner, we upgraded again. Camilo never returned our call about that price match compensation he promised, though. Surprise. Surprise.
Five months later:
We have an oven now. When Jerod called Best Buy to let them know we would need an inch cut out of a hollow space in our cabinets for the oven to fit, Camilo II** assured us that his guy coming to do the installation would be able to cut an inch out of our cabinet—no problem. The guy who came to do the installation had never talked to Camilo II in his life and he would not cut anything out of anywhere to make it fit.
So the oven sat in our garage for two days; Jerod reminded me with the frequency of a new parent checking to see if their kid is still breathing to keep it closed. People are siphoning gas from cars in Central Florida—imagine their delight when they see we have the only new microwave-oven combo in the state of Florida sitting in our open garage.
On the third day, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb, Camilo’s other guy came to install the oven with his guy who was approximately 14-and-three-quarters-years-old. It took them 15 minutes to get the job done, which is impressive, but not as impressive as the wreckage they left in their wake.
Tread marks on my prized dining room rug
Piles of shoe dirt in my foyer and my kitchen
A mini mountain of sawdust at the foot of the new oven
3 angry bees chasing me around my house (because no matter how many times I closed the door behind them, they left it open again.)
Upon their departure, they stopped to argue in my driveway—with my front door wide open, of course—and it hit me, customer service is dead.
If buying a pack of cigarettes from the local bodega is a better experience than spending more than the average American’s monthly income on an oven, what is even happening in this world?
So I did what any seemingly powerless work-from-home mom with a small social media following would do. I tweeted about it.
Read this next part very carefully:
No one is paying attention to me on Twitter. Literally, no one.
Yet, when I posted this tweet:
Best Buy responded in 30 seconds.
THIRTY SECONDS!
I. Have. The. Power.
They are just words. But instead of words privately exchanged on “recorded lines,” they are on Twitter for my three and a half followers to see, and Best Buy does not want what happens on recorded lines to become public domain. (That’s why they can’t even access their own recordings to verify what was promised.)
Unprecedented times is a term we’ve been throwing around for years now, so it’s kind of lost its luster, but never before have we lived in a society with such high expectations and such pathetic follow through.
If you want your spending experiences to be pleasant, you’ve got to use your words. I don’t mean you’ve got to tell the saleswoman at the Suburu dealership that you “don’t want any funny business.” I mean you need a platform—a blog, a newsletter, an Instagram, a Twitter no one really pays attention to.
You need a platform to find out what people are saying about the companies you’re thinking about doing business with and you need a platform to publish if things don’t go as planned.
Do you want to sit on hold for 30 minutes or do you want a tweet back in THIRTY SECONDS?
Use other people’s words to decide where you’re going to spend your cold, hard cash (and your available credit, but that doesn’t sound as cool.)
Yes, we’re all just trying to pick the company that won’t keep us waiting for an oven or a toilet for six months, but install teams will keep letting bees into your house and customer service reps will keep you pacified with lies if you keep giving them your money.
Use your words—on your platform, in a Google review, or in a newsletter you print at Office Depot and deliver to your neighbors—to tell people about your experiences. Don’t forget to write about the good stuff too.
Present day:
In conclusion, I’m still waiting for Bacarri (from Best Buy’s Twitter account) to “find a resolution,” to my stained rug and my price match promise gone wrong. Now that this post is published, I expect to hear from them soon.
*All names have been changed to Camilo to protect the guilty.
**This is Camilo the second, different from Camilo the first.