Recently, I’ve been purchasing a lot of things from my local Office Depot. The staff there are friendly and courteous, and their prices are pretty competitive. Plus it’s close to my home/office.
Of course, I also love to price/review shop on the Internet prior to making purchases. Upon landing on the home page, they had a nice chair advertised on sale. Regular $139.99 it had an instant savings of $50 that brought it down to $89.99 – not a bad deal really. Besides I could use a new chair.
When I clicked on the chair to bring up the details – the deal got even sweeter! Office Depot was going to pay me $.01 to buy it! Hell, I was ready to order 100 of them, but my local zip code indicated that the stores near me didn’t have them in stock. No big deal. I would gladly pay a little freight and order about 5 of them.
When I proceeded to checkout, none of the instant savings were applied though. Hmmm – so I called Office Depot’s number – 800.463.3768 – to see what was up. Of course, the kind Indian call center gentleman pulled up the product number and confirmed the chair should be -($.01). After some more “checking” and a 3 minute pause, he stated “I’m so sorry for the false advertisement, but the chair is $139.99 and the website is incorrect. I am reporting this to our corporate department.” Damn the luck.
Well, I couldn’t stand it so I called back on my Skype phone and recorded the call (yes, it’s legal in Louisiana as a one-party state). Sarah confirmed that the chair was being “reported to our corporate department” and that I could place an order for the chair. I couldn’t get her to outright say it was “false advertising”, which would have been fun.
What did I gain out of this? Nothing really but something to blog about!