That Hobbit Lady

This is the piece of furniture that is going to be delivered to our house tomorrow afternoon. This is, in fact, the VERY piece of furniture. We are accepting delivery of the floor model.

You see, about a month ago, Russ and I purchased a new bedroom set from a local furniture store. At the time, we were under the impression that all our pieces would be coming from the factory—BRAND NEW furniture. What we didn’t realize at the time (and neither, apparently, did the furniture store) was that the media chest we paid for was discontinued, and they were not able to order another. But rather than calling and telling us, the furniture store took it upon themselves to simply deliver their floor model instead.

Which is not right, of course, because we PAID for brand new direct from the factory furniture. Not a floor model. If they had called and explained the situation, and offered to knock down the price a little, we may have been in agreement. What we were NOT in agreement with was their attempt to pass off a floor model as new furniture without ever bothering to tell us.

But all that is beside the point, because this particular media chest has its own issues, even for a floor model. I don’t know who put this thing together, but a kindergarten class with Playskool tools could have done a better job of screwing on the back of the unit. Here’s a detail of the media chest we paid full price for:

We are completely baffled about how they ever thought we might find this in the slightest way acceptable. We discovered the flaw within an hour of delivery, called them, and they promised to order us a new piece.

It was while we were waiting for the new media chest to come in that we discovered this model had been discontinued. So we compared the pictures we had taken in the store to the piece of furniture in our bedroom and realized by several distinctive markings that we had been sold the floor model.

When the store finally called to say they had the replacement, we were curious to see how they intended to replace a piece of furniture that is discontinued and wanted to see it before it was delivered. What we saw was another example of the same model that had a completely different set of problems. Though the owner of the store promised that this piece was brand new and he had just taken out of the crate that very morning, there was a tear in the backboard, a sticker had been torn off the back (the sticker which, on all our other furniture, tells the manufacture date) and the entire backing was…discolored, in a way which indicated to me either dirt or MOLD.

Obviously this media chest was no more acceptable that the first one, and we let them know. Then, this past Saturday, we went back to the store and decided, instead, upon this NEW media chest, an updated model (the one pictured above). Which, by the way, sells for $250 more than the chest we originally ordered. But due to all the crazy circumstances surrounding this sale, we were able to settle upon this deal: this time, we would take the floor model (which has been on their floor less than a month, and we inspected it and found it to be clean and in good repair)as an even exchange for the defective furniture which is still in our bedroom at this very moment.

Everyone seems to be happy with this arrangement. Without having to plunk down any more money, we are getitng a better media chest with more storage space, and the store can at last put this messy situation behind them.

In my opinion, the salesperson and/or owner at this particular store behaved very unprofessionally during most of this ordeal, but at least in the end they finally found a way to make us happy. We probably will never buy furniture from them again, though. At this point, we pretty much trust them about as far as we could throw this media chest.

So here’s hoping everything goes well tomorrow.