Wrestling With the Sofa Salesman

Some days you just gotta love the Internet. Today I ordered a digital camera (with some cool extras), fired off an e-mail to my insurance agent (didn't have to wait on hold), added some DVDs to my Netflix queue, and renewed my library books. I don't think that the Internet can or should replace everything, but it's damn good to get some of the labor-intensive stuff done. Rather than taking up my whole day, it just took about an hour. After I'm done writing this, I'm going to go outside and clean the windows.

Compare this experience to what happened to us last night. We are in the market for new couch for our basement rec room. We've got a tiny Ikea luv seat down there and, while that's cozy, it's not very good for entertaining (side note: we're having some friends over tomorrow to watch the Oscars, which is sort of the impetus for the decision, even though it won't be here in time to save the social embarrassment of having to sit on the floor of our cold, dark basement to watch the awards). Wendy did a bit of browsing in other places and found something that came close to what we wanted, so on our way down to see it, we decided to take a detour to Ikea.

We found the perfect couch for us: A red, L-shaped couch at about $400 less than what we had intended to buy. We've had sort of a spotty history with merchandise from Ikea, but after some thought, we decided to get it. The guy who was working in that department didn't seem at first like he wanted to help us at all, but we fired off our second question, he seemed to resign himself to being stuck with helping us.

First, let me say that I know his plight. Being young and working retail for a huge company in return for a very meager wage is, to varying degrees, a soul-killing venture. Still, I doubt he was drafted by the Swedes, so he could have at least known the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground.

First, he told us we could only get it in the red or gray color. Fine, we wanted the red anyway. We asked him whether the couch we wanted was available or had to be special ordered, he told us it was discontinued and that they didn't have any in this store. When we questioned this, noting that it was in the furniture department's prime floor space without any mention of it being discontinued, he agreed that it was weird, but didn't seem interested in probing the issue further. I asked him if there was a manager to speak with, and he said no. We asked if we could buy the floor model and, after some phone calling and computer checking (which included a great deal of running his finger along the monitor's screen to line up rows), he informed us that someone was already interested in buying it, and that it had been reserved for them. The only way we could buy it, he added, was if the original prospect had decided that they didn't want to buy it.

"So, they've put a deposit down?" we asked. No, he said, they're just on the list. "So we can't buy it now because these people might want to buy it?"
"Well," he said, "we can't sell it to you because we've already promised it to them."
"Do they have some sort of time limit to make up their minds?"
"We called them to see if they still want it...but they haven't called us back."
"Okay," I said, "I'd really like to speak to your manager."

He calls and talks to his manager and finds out that it's not discontinued, we can order it, and it will take 6-8 weeks to arrive. By that time, I was pretty angry and no longer wanted to deal with him so we finished our shopping for other items and I waited in the cafeteria for Wendy to go back and buy it. Someone else was in the department, and it didn't take long to order the couch. The woman explained to Wendy that the person on the list was waiting for the couch to be discontinued and was hoping she'd be able to buy the floor model at a discount.

What made me so mad was that I don't often spend that much money, so when I do, I would prefer that someone on the other end of the equation at least care about my business.