Susan bought a new desk the other day, one she’d had her eye on for quite a while. She bought it from one of those modern flat-pack furniture shops (no, not the Swedish one) and paid a tidy sum for it. To say we’re disappointed with the result is a mild understatement — but the whole experience has shown me that the price vs. quality equation is by no means simple.
The flat-pack box had a couple of boot-prints on it — always a good sign, but seemingly par-for-the-course. Opening the box displayed the usual “just bung it all in there with a couple of bit of styrofoam to fill the gaps” packing style, and sure enough some of the parts had dents and scratches.
The assembly was fairly trouble-free, although there was one screwhead that I cannot fathom how they expected someone with normal-sized hands to reach — maybe if I could have trusted Nicholas with my stubby Philips-head we might have got it tightened.
Then once I got it all together, Susan remarked “it’s not supposed to have white drawers, is it?” Sure enough, they packed the wrong drawer fronts. Contacting the company about the mistake, they said “you’ll have to wait until we can order the parts”. When we offered to take the ones from display, something that shops will often do to stop a customer complaining, and they said “no, there will be people in the shop over the weekend looking at the desk” (meaning the customers who haven’t bought anything yet are more important than the ones that have?).
So to my thinking, this transaction has been well below the expectations I had set based on the price we paid for the item — but at each of the decision points during the transaction, the choice went in the shop’s direction. Why?
This is the complex bit. We paid $299 for the item, and factoring in the fact that we had to put it together ourselves I figure that in the traditional furniture model — where you buy finished furniture that is already assembled, and someone probably delivers for you as well — that would be something like $400-$450. In my way of thinking, paying that amount of money for anything comes with an expectation that the level of service and quality would be considerably higher than your average supermarket transaction (more on that later). Is the reason that we haven’t challenged the level of service influenced by a doubt that we really have paid enough to earn a higher level of service? Maybe had we bought the $500 desk, or the $1000 one, I’d be commenting about the fantastic service instead of the crummy service… I’m sure this is only going to get worse as I grow older and the effects of inflation start to really kick in. 🙂
Oh, the supermarket reference — Susan arrived home after a supermarket trip to find that some of her groceries were missing. Checking the docket, she realised it was the last two items on the docket — a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs — didn’t make it home. She contacted the supermarket (in spite of my heckling!) and to the surprise of both of us they said “yes, you did leave them behind, come and collect fresh ones when you next come to the store”. It appears that they keep a book, imaginitively entitled “Stuff Customers Leave at the Checkouts”, into which the details of items left behind are recorded. If someone contacts the shop to say they left something behind, they cross-reference it in the book and if there’s a matching entry the customer gets to pick up their forgotten items!
So sometimes the level of service can exceed the amount paid… 🙂
Crossed Wires 