"No Hassle"

Originally, this was going to be a post about Capital One and the fall out of the Great Indoors debacle. However, with a bit of reflection, Capital One isn't really the problem. They may not have handled things in the best way, but they at least were following a system that had the customer's needs closer to the forefront. This is a rant about Great Indoors!

(Not to leave you hanging about Captial One, basically, after the multiple charges at Great Indoors, they froze the account but didn't notify Mr. Prof. V, so when he went to buy tires he was stuck at closing arguing with Captial One about paying the bill. Cap. One was the only card he had with him at the time. The worst part about it was that the light bill had been paid off and the Cap Card was empty between the GI incident and buying tires, but their fraud alert program was in place, so it was quite a hassle to get it taken care of.)

Now, Great Indoors is a different story. I called to check on the lights to make sure that they would be delivered to the store etc. Since we need to purchase appliances for the house soon, I also wanted to see if the issue we had was a standard problem at GI, so that we could decide whether to purchase them at GI or go elsewhere.

When we checked prices and timing at Great Indoors before the light incident, they said they could get the appliances in 2-6 working days and could hold the appliances for delivery on a date we specified- and they had slightly better prices than elsewhere. These were all requirements based on the intricacies of our rebuilding project.

When I spoke with the "manager of the day" at GI, she first tried to just pass me off the managers of the departments. When I insisted that this was a more general issue, she seemed irritated and rushed. ( I called right after opening, before it should have been too busy.) I asked if she had a moment to talk because she really seemed like she didn't want to deal with me. She sighed and said, "is this going to be complicated?" I said, I am not sure, but I am in the process of trying to decide whether to buy all my appliances for my kitchen from you or not. Since that is a significant amount of money, I am not sure I want to spend it at Great Indoors if I am going to encounter the same problems." She grudgingly allowed that she had a few minutes to talk. I summed up the issue as simply as possible. "I ordered lights from you a week ago, and despite the fact that we knew what we wanted before we came in, it took three hours to process our order, and..." At this point she cut me off with, " Let me transfer you to the lighting manager." As I tried to say, "but this isn't a lighting issue." There were a series of clicks and then I was disconnected.

I tried to call back, and I was told she was unavailable. So, that made my decision for me. I will purchase the appliances elsewhere, and I will not shop at Great Indoors for anything else. I am not hopeful about the lights, but at least those are not a disaster yet. If there is a problem with GI getting us the lights, I actually have found several people who are in the lighting business who could certainly help us out- since we already know what we want.

The moral of the story, I guess is, that big business is not better business. In the future, I will go with the local small business over the big business any day.