"It is not surprising at all to find all these irate reviews. I have rarely been outraged by a company enough to seek out opportunities to tear it down through bad reviews, though just writing a bad review is hardly satisfying and there must be more I can do. This is the SECOND time this month that the same thing happened to me with this company. A couple weeks ago, my order went completely wrong and nobody ever contacted me about it. I contacted a chat representative who seemed quite incompetent, and I ended up canceling the order in my frustration and demanded a refund. This time, for a different product, again the order went completely wrong and I was never notified. I called them just now to check up on it, and it was confirmed that they were yet again dishonest on the website about the product being immediately available. The customer representative was defensive and the opposite of apologetic, though she claimed she "apologized", but give me a break. It's about tone of voice and attitude. After I asked for her name, she suddenly took on an artificially sweet tone. This is the second time Crate and Barrel has ruined my day, and I am very upset that I won't be receiving my rug in time for my house warming party."
"Unbelievably bad customer service. I mean really really bad and very upsetting.
If you are getting married and considering setting up a registry at Crate and Barrel, all I can say is DON’T DO IT! I've found the return experience with this company to be one of the most time consuming, stressful and upsetting experiences I've ever had with a company. One particular return experience took a total of 3 hours to resolve, which involved several calls to customer service, one manager making a mistake that she then lied about making to cover up her incompetency and another manager acting like she was doing us a favor by refunding us the money we were due. I am completely shocked at the level of incompetence, disrespect and lack of integrity that we experienced from the C&B managers we interacted with on this return and how little C&B was willing to do to make our negative experience just a little more positive.
You have lots of choices about where to register for your wedding gifts. Don’t discount the time that bad customer service will cost you during the already time consuming process of managing your wedding registry. This particular experience I refer to happened at a store in Burlington, MA and I write about it in particular because it went above and beyond awful, but we've had problems at other C&B stores in the Boston area during this process as well. We’ve had a GREAT experience with Amazon.com, and have yet to encounter problems with Macy’s or Williams Sonoma."
"I'm moving to a new apartment in July and I was browsing various housewares shops online for cute bathroom items. I saw lots of cute shower curtain designs but nothing within my price range until I found CB2 (part of the Crate & Barrel line). They had the most delightful "Barbershop" patterned shower curtain for a fantastic price. I chose the cheapest shipping option (standard, 5-7 days) and my package arrived only 3 days after I placed my order. I plan to shop here throughout the next month as I furnish and decorate my new place. Highly recommend C&B."
"I've ordered from Crate & Barrel and its CB2 sites quite a few times with not too many issues on shipping. Occasional broken items and things take a bit longer than I'd prefer. However, recently I tried to access a warranty for the first time and it was a bit disasterous.
They ignored my first couple of attempts at contact. Then took about a month to respond. Then required a "furniture technician" to come to my place. He was nice (not an employee, just someone who will take pictures). Immediately I received a response that because the couch was "overused" and there were pets in the building the warranty is invalid.
The fact that I only used the couhc 2 years, doing nothing more than sit on it (and not even often--I don't watch much tv). There are no cat scratches on it.
Basically, they do not back up their products, which tend to be a bit on the shoddy/cheap side. I will be avoiding their store from now on."
"I wish I didn't have to chime in on the previous poor reviews. I have ordered several items from C&B including a bookcase, media stand and dinnerware set at separate times. NONE of the deliveries were hitch-free. The first time, they shipped the wrong component to the puzzle bookcase - after my husband wasted an hour or 2 to put the other parts together. The door of our media stand arrived scratched. Even our dinnerware set order was wrong - the side plates in the set never shipped. Three strikes. The good thing was that replacements were sent quickly, but still it was a major inconvenience, waiting around for deliveries twice. My husband won't let me order from C&B again because they have wasted so much of our time. I do like Crate and Barrel's style, but they seriously need to step up quality control from both the manufacturing to the warehouses. My confidence in them as a customer is low to nonexistent."
"I ordered the Porto Headboard from Crate and Barrel in March for my birthday. The website says 7-10 day shipping. Fine. Well, what it should really say is 7-10 days plus however long it takes us to get our act together. My bed was in Florida, but it was still going to take the delivery company 4 days to get it to my house from a warehouse 45 minutes away. After calling customer service SEVERAL times, and having promised return calls never returned, I asked if Crate and Barrel would comp the shipping since there was no way the bed would arrive in 7-10 days and I had guests coming.
Instead they offered to have the delivery company give me an hour call ahead to the "phone number of my choice" (really, they weren't just going to use a phone number that was convenient for them?!) as compensation. Uhm, hello? Isn't that just good customer service anyway?
Well, I told them to cancel the order and refund my money, and they did. I, in turn, ordered a bed from Pottery Barn which cost about $100 more, but arrived ahead of schedule and then when the price dropped, they credited the difference to my account.
Moral of the story: Don't shop at Crate and Barrel... stick with Pottery Barn and stores known for their service.
Crate and Barrel has FOREVER lost my business."
"I am completely dissatisfied with the customer service at Crate and Barrel. I have previously ordered several items from this retailer before and all were delivered fast and in great condition. with this in mind, along with the love my fiance and I have for this store, we both decided to use them as a wedding registry. We added an expensive buffet and hutch on our list and it was purchased from a family member in Europe. the item was delivered and there was no noticeable damage to the boxes. However, when we began to assemble the item, we found several dents and blemishes to the front and it was in a non satisfactory condition give how valuable the item was. I then contact customer service to notify them of the damages and to see what they would be willing to fix the problem. I only had one condition, I was not going to wast another 5 hours tearing it down and building back up. I'm sorry, my time is too valuable to be wasting on someone else's mistake. I proposed to the rep that we negotiate an as-is value of the item that way the company will not be wasting money on shipping a new item to and from my house, as well as money wasted in repairing the item to sell again. I offered for them to give me 20% back plus a refund of our shipping. I didn't believe that was too much to ask given the item's value and how much we spend on shipping. Shipping furniture is not cheap, but that doesn't mean you can deliver a damaged item and just be whatever about it. The customer service took my offer and spoke and send it up the chain. I received a call back from the rep and he said they would be willing to give me a $100 credit...that's it. I'm sorry, for a piece of furniture that is about $1200, $100 as-is discount just doesn't cover it. I mean, the shipping alone was close to $200, and they only wanted to give me $100. I believe this is a disgrace to customer service. They gave me two option if the $100 wasn't good enough, to exchange the item, where I would have to waste my time again to tear down and build back up, or to completely return the item for a full refund. Well we obviously want the item because it fits our house very nicely and that is the reason we put it on our registry, so returning it is not an option. As far as exchanging it, I asked the rep, what happens if the next one is in similar condition, then your company would have wasted all that money for nothing. I then said my offer still stands as a reasonable offer. I still can't believe that we have thousands of dollars worth of items on our registry and most of them have been purchased, and when we actually run into a problem they just aren't really willing to go outside the box to resolve it. "