I relish the opportunity to address an injustice--even if it's just 1st world consumer problem. I figure if I can get duped, many others are getting duped too, and if I plead my case, it might stop the fraudulent practice.
Pottery Barn is running a variation on a bait and switch with their rewards program. I bought a sofa. The sales person highly touted the credit card as a fabulous rewards program. “They’re doing triple bonus points and you'll have hundreds of dollars in rewards to spend!" Indeed an email came, bearing my generous reward. The email delivering the reward, said to "save this email as a record of your current rewards balance," along with lots of bold boxed print about how to earn more rewards and get 10% back! Subsequently I called in a phone order to buy an end table with my reward dollars. Neither the sales person who sold me the sofa, nor the agent taking the phone order mentioned that the reward can only be used a single time, regardless of the amount being spent. Today when I tried to order another table over the phone, using the balance of my reward, I was told that I had no rewards balance because I had already used the certificate. Imagine if you had 100,000 miles in an airlines reward program, and you used 15,000 miles to upgrade and then were told that was it, you had no more miles to spend. Pottery Barn is not offering a legitimate rewards program. Services were offered that were later revoked. The email with the rewards certificate is misleading, in that it mentions the record of my rewards "balance." The purpose of this "rewards" program is, I believe to lure consumers to sign up for the credit card, and thereby the company and Comenity Bank reap the rewards of fees and interest without delivering on their promise of rewards to the consumer.
Oh--and when I tried to sort this out over the phone with customer service and asked to speak to a supervisor, I was told there was no supervisor currently available. And that there would never be a supervisor available to discuss this. And no, no one would be calling me back.
P.S. the Pottery Barn "family" includes William Sonoma, West Elm, Mark and Graham, and something I've never heard of called Rejuvenation. This fraud may be going on across the board.
Onward. To bigger things. I hope.
2 comments:
I hate it when companies do shit like this. And most people don't complain anymore but I think we need to.
Thanks for that. I don't buy things at Pottery Barn, but I do sometimes at Williams Sonoma. I may think twice about going there now. That is just a shameful scam they are running, they should be ashamed of themselves. Too bad our current administration gutted the Consumer Affairs department that Elizabeth Warren started.
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