Target

Full review
As a designer, I can appreciate the featured designer selections at Target, and love looking, every so often, at some of examples of their interior and industrial design merchandise.

However, after making a purchase from Target online one day, and experiencing the resulting debacle in trying to have the items delivered to me, I've decided that the store is much too large to be efficient in their ability to help their customers when the simplest of issues come up. They were unable to solve for it when even the smallest shop would have been able to deliver on their promise.

So, I made a small purchase of a comforter and matching shams that I absolutely fell in love with. I awaited the delivery, and a week later received the shams, via USPS but no comforter yet. I thought it was simply delayed. To my surprise, I checked my email that evening, and saw that I had received a refund for returning the comforter.

It turned out that they decided to deliver the shams via USPS, and the comforter through UPS (curious, if you ask me when logically I would expect to receive both items through the same shipping company!). UPS has proven to be unreliable in their ability to make deliveries in New York, and frequently lie about showing up at all, as they did in this scenario. No 'Sorry, I missed you' slips. Nothing.

So I called Target thinking this should be easily remedied by returning the shipment back to me. However, due to the inefficiencies of Target, and apparent lack of ability to communicate between their departments and warehouses, they said they were unable to return it back to me as they would have no idea where it has been returned to, and would have no means of tracking it down. If it was no longer available online (which it was not, as it had sold out), they were unable to do anything for me.

I then decided to call UPS and managed to track down the exact warehouse that the comforter had been returned to, but still, Target has no means of doing anything about that.

Not only that, but with each successive customer representative I spoke to, the more disjointed their information seemed. For example, one would say that the item should be back in stock online within a month, and another would say it will no longer be in stock in the future. Even worse was when I would call local Target stores to check if it might be available for me to purchase in person. It turns out that their merchandise product numbers do not even match those online.

I was deeply disappointed, as here I am, with two shams, no matching comforter, and I am expected to pay to return the shams that have now been rendered useless to me.

This was a deeply disappointing online shopping experience for me, and I hesitate to ever order from Target online again. It's back to supporting the local and smaller shops and boutiques where they know how it's done.