Consumer bliss

My wife and I have had a bit of consumer bliss of late…first off, my three year old’s Columbia winter jacket zipper pull broke. My wife called around to the cleaners thinking they could quickly fix it — they told her that it would cost $35. For a zipper? Come now. Grandma is pretty sharp when it comes to fixing stuff like this so she thought Walmart would have suitable zipper and she’d rip out the busted one and sew in a functioning zipper. She was unable to locate a replacement and trotted off to a shoe repair place that she thought might present a solution. They indicated to her that Columbia guarantees their zippers for life. Or something like that. A local department store in her neck of the woods sells Columbia-wear, so she headed there only to hit a speed bump. The jacket with the bad zipper was not bought at this department store, so they couldn’t help. I bet I could bad mouth this store until the cows come home, but I’m not surprised in the least from the stuff I’ve heard over the years. Par for the course. Anyway, before departing from the fickle store, grandma was able to obtain a Columbia 800 number. She called them up, was hooked up with custumer service and they told her that they’d look for a replacement zipper for her and if they couldn’t find one to send her that they would send her a replacement jacket. They looked. No love. We now have a new winter jacket. Now that’s customer service.

The lovefest doesn’t end there. We upgraded our screen porch this spring (I’ll post something with pictures at some point), essentially turning it into a three-season porch. We opted to kick out the chairs we had and nab something from IKEA for the room. We wanted to equip this space with something more comfortable than what we had before. We came up with a nice, comfy little loveseat and chair. We loaded the loveseat into the back of the truck and hauled it home. Somewhere along the way, whether the damage was done at IKEA or by us, a castor broke off. My wife, being both decisive and determined, called up IKEA and in rather short order had them sending us a replacement castor. A couple days later we had the castor and I put the new one on the loveseat. IKEA already rocks. Now they rock twice as much.

Yesterday, we completed consumer trifecta. As my faithful readers already know, we were on the look out for Dyson vacuums. We don’t respect our current vacuum despite its longevity. We needed an upgrade in the vacuum department in the worst way — plus, we could never get excited about vacuuming. Just no incentive in it. So we opted to do a little comparing at the Dyson website and came up with some possibilities from that experience. We did some review checking at Epinions and were satisfied that we’d read enough. The only question was: DC14 or DC15? To Ball or not to Ball? We figured we needed to test drive it before could start scoping out the best priced final choice. We drove to a couple of retail outfits that carried Dyson’s, but couldn’t find a place that had those pesky DC15′s. After a fair amount of driving, we arrived at Sears to try out the new model. They are cool. We freely admit that, but the unfortunate thing was that my wife also believed driving it straight could prove more difficult than the DC14 and in terms of wear-and-tear on the wrist, the DC15 could be hurt her more. She felt that the DC14 was more stable and for those reasons, the selection was made. Price comparisons between the online retailers and brick-and-mortar never did happen. Sears was offering up a $100 Sears card promotion with Dyson vacuum purchases so we effectively came home with a $336 vacuum. Very smooth Sears, very smooth.

My props go out to Columbia, IKEA and Sears. Did I just use the word “props” in a sentence? Ouch.