Today is a monumental day in Caleb's life. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we went to get a crib matress for Caleb's crib. We set up the crib yesterday and put Caleb down in the crib for the first time tonight. Caleb will no longer be sleeping in our room and Granddaddy's bassinet is being put back into retirement either until Caleb has a little brother/sister or a cousin. The events leading up to this moment have been quite exasperating. We had registered for baby gifts a Baby's R Us (BRU). Shortly after creating our registry, BRU sent us a flyer letting us know that shortly after the due date, we would receive a coupon in the mail giving us 10% off the items remaining on our registry. We thought this was a good deal because we had some pricey items on the registry and we knew that if we did not receive those items as gifts, a 10% discount would be huge.
So, Caleb comes along and is born a couple of weeks early. While Mom and Caleb were still in the hospital, I made a trip out to BRU. There were some things Mom wanted available when we brought Caleb home. Granddaddy was with me in his giant SUV, so I got the bright idea that it would be really great if we could get some of the larger items and bring them home while the optimal transport was available. (Thanks Granddaddy, I always knew you were good for something.)
I went into BRU and explained to the girl at the registry desk that I had a registry there and my baby had been born a couple of weeks early. (It's not like I was trying to scam them or anything...I was wearing the bracelet from the hospital proving that I had a baby back at the hospital.) I further explained that there were several items that we would like to get right away and I asked if they could go ahead and give me the discount even though I did not have the coupon available. She went and asked the manager and they both came back to tell me that they did not have the power to override the system in that manner. (They did give me a $10 off coupon...whooptee doo. I bought a couple of items and the $10 worked out to be way more than 10% of what I bought, so I those two items, they got the short end of the deal.) My next question was whether they could move the due date forward so the coupon would be mailed to us a little sooner. They thought about it and decided that was probably a pretty good way to handle the situation.
After a few weeks, Mom was starting to get antsy about the coupon which had not arrived yet. She called BRU customer service and a representative told her that she was supposed to request the coupon in order for it to be mailed. So she requested the coupon. However, we were perplexed becuase the original flyer had said nothing at all about our duty in claiming the coupon. We waited for the coupon to show up.
After a couple more weeks, still no coupon. This time, when Mom calls customer service, she is told that the other person is wrong and you dont have to request the coupon. However, by changing the due date, we had messed the system up. This customer service rep said that all we needed to do was verify our adress and a coupon would be on the way. We waited some more.
We went into the store to return some duplicate items we had received. Mom went to the registry desk to see if they could help us get our coupon. The only thing the registry desk girl did was call the same customer service number Mom had been calling. We were flabbergasted. The people in the store really know nothing about this promotion and have no idea how it works. After talking for a few minutes, the registry girl tells us that a coupon is on the way. She also tells that if it is on the way and that if it does not arrive, she gave us the name of the customer service rep to call. Just a first name. I was immediately skeptical because I've tried to call phone centers before with just the first name of a rep and they have never been able to transfer me to that person.
We wait some more and, of course, the thing still never arrives. Mom finally makes yet another call and asks to speak to a supervisor. On one of her previous calls, Mom had asked for a supervisor and was told that there were no supervisors in the call center. The rep would have to put in a request for a supervisor to call Mom. As you can probably guess by now, the supervisor never called. On this call, Mom told this story and said she really wanted a supervisor to call her. One finally did call and Mom explained the entire ordeal. The supervisor told Mom that he was the last person she would have to talk to about this situation and he agreed that it had not been handled properly all along. He took down our address and said he would send us a coupon. Mom explained that we have been greatly inconvenienced by this whole situation and aksed if there was anything else he could do for us. He said he would look into it. We haven't heard from it since.
A couple of weeks ago, we were starting to grow skeptical again. We were reaching the outer edge of the time frame he had given for the arrival of the coupon. We had daily conversations about whether Mom should call in again, but it finally arrived. Of course, the only thing in the envelope was the coupon. No apology, no additional compensation. Just the coupon.
So, we agreed that we were only going to buy the things we absolutely needed and not spend any more money than we had to at BRU. Poppy and TuTu had given us a gift card for the purpose of buying Caleb's next car seat. Mom wanted the crib mattress more than anything else. I pointed out that if we were going to put him in the crib, we needed a monitor. So those things became essentials. We also ended up getting the rug that matches the rest of his bedroom decorations. In addition to the gift card Poppy and TuTu gave us, we had other BRU gift cards that had been given to us and that we had received when we returned items. We had one generic Visa gift card and a lot of people had just given us cash. We used the Visa card and a little bit of the cash to complete our purchase, accomplishing the goal of not really spending more money there than we had to.
However, our saga was not quite over. When we got to the store, we printed our registry (remember, the coupon is only good for items from our registry which had not been purchased) and we went to get the car seat. It turns out the model we had selected was discontinued and not available. The next model was out for more money. We went to the store manager and explained the situation. We found a manager that was either competent or actually disposed to helping out customers. She told us it was no problem, she would just manually enter the 10% discount when we were ready to check out. This makes me think that the manager could have manually given me the discount way back during Caleb's first week and was either incompetent or too afraid to think outside the box and assist a customer. We ran into the same situation with the baby monitor. Only there was not even a similar model from the same manufacturer. We selected a model with the same price point and the manager was gracious enough to extend the discount to the monitor as well.
We have not been pleased with BRU throughout this entire ordeal. At least it ended on a fairly pleasant note. One of my biggest pet peeves is when there is not communication within a single organization. It is so frustrating when the retail outlet has no idea how to deal with "backroom" operations such as a catalog division or promotions, etc. It's just extremely inefficient. With the exception of the occasional clothes purchase, I think we are done with BRU. We certainly won't register there when it becomes apparent that Caleb is going to have a younger sibling if God so chooses to bless us.
We set the crib up and Caleb's room is just about done. There are a couple of things I need to hang up and it will be complete.
I really wanted to vent about BRU. But there were a couple of additional pictures of Caleb today that were just really cute. One of the pictures is of Caleb's last morning waking up in the bassinet. The other two are Caleb sleeping while we were out to lunch with friends. I'll post them here at the end without any additional commentary. Enjoy!
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