This is the nearest OfficeMax, but this is actually a review of the online ordering process, which is from Hell.
I bought a chair from OfficeMax yesterday. It was an exhausting struggle. The DMV and the Post Office can't compete in resisting taking money from the public. OfficeMax succeeds in resisting the profit motive and providing a far worse experience.
Here's the scenario: I need a widely adjustable chair and OfficeMax has one at decent price. They're offering $20 off and free shipping if and only if I order online. I've got a $50 OfficePerks credit which will expire in a couple months. I've got a store credit money card and have just purchased several $25 gift cards from a website that lets you buy 4 a month (it didn't have to be OfficeMax, but I planned this purchase) at 10% off...
The $20 off is via a checkout code, and you can enter three of those, so no problem there.
But they only allow one "gift card" on an order. And the "reward" masquerades as a gift card, so I can't use my store credit or any of the gift cards.
OK, that's disappointing. Inexcusable, really. Starbucks allows you to transfer balances between cards, which would be a workaround, but OfficeMax can't (the friendly lady at OM customer service said you could, but put me on hold and came back to say "no", nor can you use smaller gift cards to buy a larger one or an eCertificate). I don't know whether I could use more than one in-store, but the online-only code precluded that possibility. Why is OfficeMax is stupider than Starbucks...?
I found out about the "only-one" rule during checkout when I tried to enter a second card. The floating window pops up and you can enter a second card and its security code -- THEN it tells you that you can't use it, or substitute it for the first card entered, so it's just wasted your time. Worse than that, it also apparently sets some sort of flag saying you've committed an error, and does not reset it properly when you close the floater. It will punish you for this later.
When you enter the pin it substitutes dots for what you type. I'm at home, I have no need of this "security feature". It makes it harder to tell if you've entered it correctly (or whether copy-and-paste has introduced an artifact) and intelligent form design would provide a check box to disable this... but "intelligent" is clearly a misnomer when applied to anything OfficeMax,
...which is immediately proven by the fact that after the credit from your gift card is transferred to your invoice the checkout process requires you to enter the security code you've just entered on the popup window AGAIN on the invoice! And not for the last time, it turns out. Because if it decides that you've made an error on, say, the pin for your credit card used to pay the balance it will ERASE this unrelated entry (as well) and make you do it again, dots and all.
It complained about a bad entry, or the initially unnoticed erasure, several times to my increasing frustration. I was convinced that I was actually not making repeated errors behind the dots and resorted to beginning the checkout process from my shopping cart AGAIN, a couple times, to reset the apparent phantom flags.
I was planning to go out that night, but the process of extracting a chair from OfficeMax was so long and exhausting that I ended up late and exhausted and trashed my plans. Thank you, OfficeMax! read more