Category: General

This world is all about customer service. It is all about showing customers that you care. Office Depot used to be a fun place to shop with pleasant sales people and great prices. It appears that Best Buy stole everyone’s thunder, not that they offer any great customer service but people do seem to bond with them. Anyway, Office Depot is now in not-so-great a shape and trying to fight back.

So I get a "40 Dollars off 200 Dollar or more" coupon from them by email. Up to 20% off, which is great. I am looking for an office chair for home, to rest my weary body when I work on my thesis or at night, for work work. So I look around their site, see a couple of decent looking chairs thinking, ‘boy, pretty stupid to buy chairs having never actually sitting in them’.  That lead me to the thought of – ‘what if I dislike this fancy $400 chair I am looking at. What’s Office Depot’s return policy?’. And that chair had a ‘Special Order Return Policy’.

So what is a ‘Special Order Return Policy‘ inquiring minds ask? For furniture, that means…

Furniture
Sorry, custom ordered or special order furniture items, and Manufacturer Direct items, are custom made to your specific requirements and, as such, may not be returned. For your protection please make your custom purchase selections carefully.

In other words – tough luck. No returns.

So why do you even bother with having a return policy link at all and instead not say ‘Sorry, no returns’?! Staples has a special policy too but they DO accept returns, and several other online merchants have policies ranging from full refund including round-trip shipping (which pretty darn amazing) to just returns with penalties like restocking fees and paying for the shipping in both directions.

And yeah, Office Depot, I will share that product with my friends on Facebook, Dig and del.icio.us. For sure. Probably oversight, still lame.