Thursday, May 05, 2005

Boycott Sleepy's

I know it is a cry in the wilderness, but to anyone who happens to be searching for Sleepy's and has stumbled across this humble page, please, buy your mattress somewhere else. I have never encountered a company with more contempt for its customers. Coupled with more phony and in the end offensive "customer is always right, satisfaction guaranteed" claptrap, Sleepy's might be the sleaziest operation in an industry known for its sleaziness. I bought an expensive mattress from the company, and it turned out to be defective. Rather than offer to replace it, they told me I would have to wait several days for a third-party inspector to come and document the defects in order to have a new one shipped out. The third-party company would call me (when they were could and ready) to schedule this inspection, and they called several days later, and told me they couldn't do it on weekends, so I would have to burn a vacation day in order to have this taken care of. The soonest they could come was more than a week later -- which means I would continue to sleep on my defecive mattress for another ten days. When the inspector finally came, I showed him the defect and asked him what might have caused it. He said, "I don't know anything about mattresses, I am an upholsterer." Then he documented the side of the bed where there was no defect, despite my vain protests." But that bulge, over there, why aren't you documenting that? Shouldn't you be taking pictures of that? "I'm just here to measure what I've been told to measure," he said. This meant putting a string across the bed, holding a ruler next to it, and taking a close up. He told me then not to orry, that the bed was defecive and it wouldn't be a problem. I just needed to wait another 10 days while the inspection was filed wth Sleepy's home office, who I had to keep calling and calling until finally the results came in. Naturally, they told me my defective bed was fine and that the inspection turned up no defects. I then realized the point of their inspections was apparently to protect them from having to ever replace defective beds. So I demanded to talk to someone to schedule another inspection at the very least. In order to do this I had to wait on hold for a half hour for a customer representative, who told me she would fax the requisite paper work (which she refused to send to me as well) to another inspection company, who would contact me to schedule another appointment. A fax, you'd expect, would travel across the wires nearly instantly. But it's been several days, and this third-party company has seen nothing of my paperwork. Of course, I could call Sleepy's back and wait for another half hour on their customer service line, only to have them tell me that they'll re-fax it. Or I could sit tight and wait for the "five to seven days" Sleepy's told me it takes for these fax transmissions to be processed.
It's too late for me to get out of this mess. I share my story so that perhaps you might not get in it.

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