The Duvet Code

I tell you, for all the difficulty of finding the duvet we want in any of the debenhams stores in our locality we might as well be on the quest for the holy grail I tell you....

Phil and I head off into Oxford today so he can get his hair cut, and whilst he's doing that I have a look around the shops. One thing that springs to mind is that I should perhaps nip into Debenhams to see if they have the duvet we want - I don't know why I thought they might have it, after all the Banbury store didn't - but ever the optimist I thought I'd give it a go, and yes! They do have the one we want (well I thought it was, but on closer inspection with Phil it appears it's not the one we want at all).

So I'm getting a bit fed up with not being able to get this duvet in the actually shop outlets, so collar a woman to ask here if they can order one in, which it appears they can't - they just get the stock they are given, which on past experience probably wouldn't include the duvet we want because it's "expensive" - isn't that some kind of fooked up marketing?! Anyway, we do manage to glean some info out of her which is a bit more useful that the website description of the duvet, that being that yes, in fact it is 2 duvets which make the the 13.5 tog, so idea for summer use since you can either have 9 tog or 4.5 tog. But we don't come out of the shop completely unscathed as she tries to sell us this other type of duvet. Now forgive me for being none sales orientated here, but considering she knows the duvet we want is a feather and down one (ie natural filled) you'd have thought she wouldn't have tried to palm us off with a man made hollow filled thing which was just nasty. So with not much reluctance we manage to escape the tentacles of the misinformed rep and head home.

When we do get back I make a call to the Debenhams customer service line and after being cut off the first time I finally get through to someone, who whilst not very helpful, or incredibly polite for that matter (I think he was a born complainer) he's also pretty sure the duvet we want is 2 in one, so we take the plunge and order one on the website.

Well we thought we did, see the problem is that the website is so slow, despite putting in all the credit card details etc etc we don't actually get a confirmation page saying the order has been taken. Nor do we get an email saying the order has been received for a good 30 mins or so, leaving us in a bit of limbo as to what to do beforehand, should we buy again, or wait? It seems waiting paid off though, I guess we just have to wait and see if the duvet actually shows up now...

I dunno, I don't understand these companies who have online facilities but don't make those facilities able to handle heavy loads of traffic. Ok, granted they were having a 25% sale, so there would be much more traffic than normal, but it's not as if they didn't know the sale was going to happen now is it?

2 words the IT industry and marketing departments could be more aware off then.... planning and foresight....

Posted by Abi on the May 27, 2006 9:22 PM