Michaels is such a massive corporation that my review here is probably inconsequential. I went on their website to try to submit feedback to corporate, but no such link existed, which is revealing in itself about a business.
I went to the store today to pick up some required supplies for an art class. Upon my arrival, when I tried to pull up the website on my phone to access the coupons, the entire website was down. When I went into the store and spoke with an associate, she confirmed that the website was down. When I asked about them honoring the coupon, she said I would have to just buy my stuff and return another day of the week before the coupon expired to have my sale refunded and then rung up again. When I indicated that this really wasn't fair to my time/energy/gas expense, nor to my schedule between now and Sunday, the associate just blinked. The attitude during the entire discussion was rather unkind -- which is awkward; it's not like I personally caused the entire Michaels website to crash, so I don't understand why she had an attitude toward me from the moment the discussion began. There was zero empathy.
I have to say that I have not liked Michaels since the pandemic. It has been unfortunate watching them go downhill. It happened, I think, as a result of the death of competition -- JoAnns in Waterford left and AC Moore left in New London. Michaels effectively has a monopoly on the area for arts & crafts supplies if you're trying to shop brick & mortar / locally.
The prices have since skyrocketed. All the prices are inflated, so the only way to shop and receive normal pricing is through their coupons (rather like sales model that Kohls uses). I strongly recommend that you do not shop here without first getting your hands on the coupons -- and apparently you need to print and carry them with you as if it's 2004 rather than 2024. They've cut back substantially on employees, so it's hard to get any assistance, and they've installed a series of self-checkout machines to push the labor onto the customer, just like the other big retailers have done at Wal-Mart, etc. Lastly, their selection isn't as diverse as A.C. Moore had before. All in all, it's really a bummer. I try not to shop there much, and I've stopped doing a lot of arts & crafts in recent years.
Today, I decided to just leave and buy the supplies I needed on Amazon. It saved me approximately $30, and it should be on my doorstep by Monday.
Thus, you can see the foolishness on Michaels' part. At bare minimum, they should have offered a 10% off discount and a sincere apology about their technological problems and done their best to keep the sale. Some profit is better than zero profit because you lost the entire sale to online competition. The coupon was for 40% off of the total sale, if you're curious, so that's what they were telling me to walk away from or else return on Fri/Sat/Sun for them to refund and re-do the sale... It's odd... Since they know the coupon exists and is active, you'd think they would just do it manually in their system... I digress. They did me a favor, anyway; even with their 40% off coupon, I would have been paying them more than Amazon. But I suspected that walking in there. It was a trade-off I was willing to make to buy locally. Alas. I'm willing to pay a bit more, but not double because your system is having technical difficulties and your staff don't understand customer service or economics.
I'm in no hurry to return again, and I would not recommend them. read more
