West Elm

Full review
West Elm is ridiculous!

This is not to say that other, similar stores are not acting in the same ridiculous manner but West Elm is just the latest.

I ordered sale items a few days ago and received the typical Order Confirmation.

"Thank you for shopping with west elm. We have received your order, and it is currently being processed. Please see below for details."

Although the item was on sale, it was put onto backorder which it indicated on the website before you made the actual purchase. I do not have a problem with that especially as they told you up front that it was not currently in stock.

Since I have had problems with other stores never shipping and never notifying that they were not going to ship as they would never, ever, ever have the item in stock (Plow and Hearth), I called up West Elm and asked them about my order. I spoke to several people and received a variety of stories about the likelihood of having my order ever filled.

It was not looking good and it really made me angry. When you buy furniture and accessories, you take the time to measure things, consider the color, move things around, etc. before finally settling on something that you think will work. I had already wasted half a day deciding to buy from West Elm and was wasting another hour trying to get a straight answer from them.

Apparently, West Elm and the other Williams Sonoma stores share a warehouse and share the same inability to keep track of inventory and orders. Apparently, they do not have a live inventory system. For a company this size, that is a stunning admission.

When you order from them, they may or may not actually have the item in stock. The website accepting an order means nothing. On top of this, for some (or many?) items, this does not just mean a backorder, it means your order will never be fulfilled.

Apparently, in this high tech system, your web order goes to some department which (I think) is called editing. I have no idea who or what that is. Perhaps these are the people sent to physically peer inside the "bins" at the warehouse and physically count the number of items inside against a stack of orders. I do not really know but this is what it sounds like.

This process is said to take 24 hours but, it apparently takes twice that long as that is how long it took to receive a second email saying that this order would never be fulfilled. Sorry. End of story.

2 days and several aggravating (and sometimes incredibly rude and snide) discussions about a simple order and all of the slick marketing and sending out of catalogs leads to nothing but customer aggravation.

Is this any way to run a company like this? Why are the men who work at West Elm so rude? The women were nice and sympathetic but the men were incredibly rude. They should not work in retail.

The upshot is that it is pointless to buy at West Elm because you may get product or you may get nothing but aggravation. At any rate, you cannot trust the ordering system as it does not know what it is talking about.

I have ordered 3 times from West Elm with the following consequences:

First time: items meant to hang on a wall arrived without hardware (screws) to hang them up on said wall.

Second time: no problem

Third time: It is time to chuck West Elm out the door.

Upshot: West Elm should stop sending out catalogs (they do have a website after all) and spend the money on buying a live inventory system AND more inventory.