With the holiday seasons upon us, I had purchased 2 Pottery Barn robes and slippers for my work staff to thank them for what they do every day to provide great customer service. However, I was not prepared to be faced with such appalling service by a particular Pottery barn Lynnfield employee (a blonde woman, name not as certain, maybe Sheryl?).
The purchase was made online and it came in the shipping box only. Since I thought it would be more festive to have the official holiday gift boxes from Pottery Barn, I stopped by the store at Marketplace this week on the day with a snow storm after work. Due to the weather, there was almost no customers in the store. I inquired if they had gift boxes available for my online purchase. This blonde woman appeared very uninterested in helping in anyway, and said that "You can buy tissue paper and plain cardboard boxes and wrap it yourself. And they will be $7 dollars each." I was stunned because I had bought robes in 2016 at the same store and they wrapped it without any issue. Since it did not sound fair and the lady came across as arrogant and unhelpful, I did not wish to waste more time and money with her in the store any longer on a day with bad weather. So I left.
Then I returned back during lunch time later in the week hoping to resolve this even just with regular Pottery Barn shopping bags (instead of the cardboard box that it came in the mail). This time, I can see behind the counter that the red holiday boxes had arrived. A more competent and efficient lady listened to my inquiry about finding holiday boxes big enough for the robe and slippers. She looked at a few different options wanting to find the right size for it, and then she asked the blonde lady who was apparently was working somewhere else in the store. Once again, this employee immediately swayed the first lady again and said that it was an online purchase, they couldn't wrap it. They wouldn't let me even buy the big enough boxes I needed and insisted that they couldn't part them.
This was THE most ludicrous thing I have ever heard: A store can't part with their packaging boxes? Laughable. Who are you holding the boxes out for? Other customers you fail to help and enrage? Instead of using this as an opportunity to solve a simple issue of providing a suitable regular shopping bag or box and win over existing loyal customers with continual track records of purchasing products of the entire Williams Sonoma parent company (Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn kids, Williams Sonoma, Marks and Graham and West Elm), this employee was embarrassingly not helpful.
She left a customer feeling bewildered that after thousands of dollars spent in the store over the years, a simple task of providing a preferred reasonably sized box for the customer to take home could not be executed. Her message of deciding what kind of service a customer receive based on where they bought it from (the store or online) was ill-placed and short-sighted. Her customer service was spectacularly inadequate, and she was unable to competently reflect her company's mission. She should not represent Pottery Barn. read more