| rev:text
| - I've been receiving West Elm catalogs since well before there was an actual retail location here in AZ, and I absolutely love the style and beauty of many of their items.
That said, I was thrilled to see the Scottsdale Quarter location would be so close to my office! I've shopped at this location multiple times with average to subpar experiences each time.
The actual store is bright, modern, and lovely albeit a bit small considering that it is a furniture showroom. I enjoy their knick knack section, which seems to rotate regularly, and I also love their linens.
The true problem is the staff in this store.
I shopped at the store during Christmas - I had seen a beautiful jewelry tree that I was interested in purchasing and asked a nearby employee if there were any that were already boxed up. She uninterestedly asked me which one I was talking about (which was the one immediately in front of us) She gestured towards the back wall of the store and I noticed that there was a larger version of it on the opposite side of a display (which cost 3x as much)- perfect! I headed over to take a closer look and when I turned to ask another question of the employee, she was long gone. I finally decided to buy two gifts - one small and one large jewelry tree, and then headed to the front of the store with my purchases. I once again asked the girl at the cash-wrap whether they had a box for the gifts, as I was planning to ship them. Mind you, the entire store was littered with displays of gift boxes of all sizes as they were touting the special West Elm boxes as perfect packaging for your Christmas gifts. The employee helping me scrunched up her face and tried to say that they didn't have many left and she couldn't give me one. I pressed further and she reluctantly walked over to the nearest display to see if any of those boxes would work. After awhile, she could not find a gift box that was appropriate and I explained again that I needed to ship the gift and would REALLY like a box. At my insistence, she went and found a box in the back to pack the larger tree into so that I could ship it to my sister. This should not have been quite so difficult and I was left feeling unvalued as a customer.
This past week, I returned to West Elm in search of a picture frame. I found what I was looking for on the back wall of the store - the gallery frames, which were coincidentally on sale. I searched amongst the stacks of frames for the correct size and had no luck, so I spotted an employee a few feet away in the next section and popped over to ask for her help - I wanted to know if perhaps they had my size in the back of the store since I could not find it myself. She seemed unhappy with my question and stalked over to the shelves of frames to look for herself. She condescendingly discussed my request with someone over her headset as though it was the most difficult thing in the world and after several minutes of this I finally said that if it was too inconvenient I could just take the next size up. The woman huffed disgustedly at me, spun on her heel, and walked over to another employee to start a conversation with no further offer of help...
When I went up to the cash wrap, it was deserted. I searched around for an employee for a minute and thought I heard someone through the doorway to the stockroom. I called for them and eventually a gentleman appeared. He asked what I needed and I told him I needed to check out. While he was helping me with my purchase, he asked if anyone had assisted me. I mentioned that I didn't know her name, but referenced the rude behavior of the employee who was back by the frames and he sarcastically said "oh, the rude one, well that narrows it down for me" before continuing to check me out. No apology or further inquiry ... nothing.
Now, he was quite nice and seemed to be trying to subtly recover my business, but unfortunately didn't seem to understand a key part of customer service which is to address and apologize for any inconvenience ... and his kindness was just not enough to fix it.
I don't plan to return to this store, and although I love and recommend their products, I am hesitant to continue purchasing products from their company altogether, even through their catalog. I am completely surprised as I have never experienced anything but great service in their other brand-stores (Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, Restoration Hardware)
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)