Life as Crisis Management: The Costco Kiada (aka, the Costco Muck-up)

 

I recently decided to join the Costco Club. I did it for several reasons. First, Costco is coming to where I live and I wanted to have a membership before it opens. Second, Costco had a bed I wanted, a bed brand the New York Times’s Wirecutter liked, and I needed a new twin instead of a full bed for myself. Third, if you joined and used a code you got a $45 dollar credit toward future purchases.

Anyway, I ordered the bed, got it, put it on my new Zinus bed frame and liked it (it is quite comfortable) and liked the experience I had with Costco. So I decided to use my $45 dollar credit and order two items amounting to over $800 dollars. 

I looked forward to receiving these items then I learned there was a problem. My order was cancelled. It took me 40 minutes with the chat associates to learn why. That, by the way, was an experience in and of itself. The first associate was going to transfer me to his supervisor but transferred me instead to a private home telephone number. The person who answered was not amused. The second associate eventually said that my shipping and billing addresses were different and that was why the order was cancelled. She said the latter had the address and the apartment number on the same line while the former had the exact same address with the apartment number on a second line instead. How horrible! No wonder the computer could not make sense of it. Computers we should always remember, thanks to their literalism, cannot see that two same addresses with a slight variation are the same.

So, I went to change my addresses. To go back a bit I do recall that when I ordered the two items that were cancelled that I noticed that the shipping address, according to the Costco website had a New England zip code. That was odd since I did not live in New England and Costco had sent my bed to the right address and billed the order to the correct credit card. So, I changed my shipping address before I ordered. When I went back to look at the addresses again after my forty minute chat and call with Costco customer service agents, I found that both the shipping and the billing were exactly the same. Still I changed them to the same address Costco, using USPS data no doubt, suggested. Will it work? Who knows.

Will I be ordering from Costco again? I don’t know. Possibly not. I can get the items I wanted locally and will likely do so within a few months. At least then I won’t have to screw around with stupid computers and stupid websites not to mention customer service agents.

Postscript: So, I chatted with a Costco representative to try to ascertain if my billing and shipping addresses were the same. This turned out, not surprisingly, to be Kafkaesque. Chat sent me to member services on the phone. Member services sent me to online. Online sent me to orders. All in all I spent an hour on the phone being passed from one customer service person to another who told me they could not help but someone else could. Could that someone else help me? Perhaps. Only time and ordering something will tell. Stay tuned.