Tomorrow is Rachel's birthday. Last night we went out with her family for dinner. Afterwards, we went back to Grilleyville to open presents.
Naturally, I got Rachel some Donald Duck stuff. Unlike most of what I get her, this lot came from the Disney Store. I stopped in a while back after a doctor's appointment and discovered they had put much of the 65th birthday stuff on sale. So I went a little overboard.
I bought over $500 worth of stuff.
Of course, since I was on the bus, I didn't really want to lug it all home (some of the pieces were rather large) myself. So I paid to have them ship it. Since I'm not home two days out of the week, I told them I wanted to have them ship it so it would arrive on a day that I was home.
So the clerk wrote down that it should be sent the following Monday, to arrive Wednesday or Thursday. Alas, it didn't get shipped until Friday, so it arrived on Monday. Meanwhile, I had already received my credit card bill, with the charge listed.
Of course, I wasn't home on Monday to collect it, so the shipper left a note saying that they had been by, and would be back the next day -- Standard Operating Procedure for most shippers. Often, the include the name of the company or person the package came from. Which is why I wanted to avoid this situation. So Rachel came home and found the paper from Airborne.
Luckily, they did not indicate who the package was from, so Rachel's surprise was preserved. I contacted Airborne express and made arrangements to have it redelivered when I would be home. By this time, however, I convinced that one of the more expensive items would definitely be broken.
You see, when I originally purchased this piece -- a ceramic scene featuring Donald at a drafting board surrounded by smaller figures representing Donald through the years -- the sales lady and I examined two boxed, never-opened examples taken from the back room, only to find that at least one of the smaller figures had been broken off on each.
I am certainly glad that she insisted we check them -- Disney did such a bad job of designing the packaging that I'm surprised any have survived at all. One did -- the one on display in the window. So we packed that one up as carefully as we could, with some extra tissue for good measure, and hoped for the best.
Still, after the delays and general cluelessness on the part of the Disney store staff when I tried to check on the order, I was certain that the piece would be destroyed before it got to me. So I had the delivery guy wait while I opened it so that he could vouch that it was broken on delivery if necessary. Amazingly, it had arrived intact.
That wasn't the end of the saga, however. When I examined the reset of the package, I found several items missing, including two of the more expensive pieces -- a watch with a "frosted glass" (plastic) figure ($90) and a large resin figure on a stand ($125).
So there I was, back on the phone to the disney store. Eventually, they said they would ship them out, and we went through the same routine about when I would and would not be home. Of course, they screwed that up again, and the package first arrived on Monday.
Somehow, I managed to keep Rachel from finding out about it. Now I had everything, although much of it was badly packed. I squirrelled it away in the closet until I could find the time to wrap it all up. I didn't get a chance until this past weekend, so it wasn't until then that I noticed that not only had someone switched the two size Small t-shirts I had bought for Mediums, one of them still had the ink tag on it.
For those who live in more honest climes, Ink tags are plastic doohickeys that stores attach to clothes to prevent theft. If the tag is tampered with, or one tries to remove it without using the official device, it dumps a load of ink all over it, rendering the garment unwearable. It doesn't get the store their clothes back, but it does make the clothes less desirable to thieves in the first place.
My problem is that even if I walked in with my receipt, the store manager would have to assume that the receipt was for a legitimate purchase, but that the shirt was a second one I had pinched. Back to the phone I went.
I explained the situation, expressed my dissatisfaction and disappointment, and asked what to do about the situation. The manager told me that I could just come down and they would take care of it, and that she would be sure to let the other managers know of my predicament. The problem there, of course, is that I don't get downtown very often.
(In case you were wondering, no, they didn't have any more shirts in Small to replace them with.)
Now, if I were the manager, I would have shipped another shirt out right away and said keep both (and come down when you like to have the ink tag removed) but they probably didn't have any more of these shirts. She did call back later and leave me a message offering to have Airborne Express pick up the shirt, bring it to the store, and then ship it back to me, and I may very well take her up on that.
For an added laugh, consider that when I was at the store, I mentioned that the last time Disney had shipped something to me, it had been a 18"x5"x5" nutcracker, which showed up in a shipping about about 3'x2'x18", with a few pieces of paper folded neatly in the bottom of the box. I brought that up in part so that perhaps they might take a little extra care in packing and handling my order, but it seems it didn't help.
All in all, it has been a most disappointing experience.