How to not buy a cooker

We returned from our holiday to a mountain of post, a soppy cat and a cooker with a faulty oven. Put simply, the oven just would not warm up. We thought of having it mended but concluded that the cooker’s time was up. It was old when we, then as tenants of this house, first met it in 1999 and, back then, the oven door had a handle.

We bit the bullet and started looking around the local shops. As is so often the case, we found the right cooker in the first shop we visited. Sadly, we didn’t realise this until several hours later, by which time Apollo 2000 had sold out. They didn’t expect any new deliveries for a little while.

That evening, I saw that we could buy the cooker from Currys’ website for £230: seventy pounds cheaper than in their shops and almost the same as it would have cost at Apollo 2000. The item was out of stock so I tried for a few days, eventually being able to place my order on Monday, 28^th August. We were asked to state our three preferred delivery dates and chose the following Saturday, Sunday and Monday, those being the earliest available dates.

A couple of days later we received a phone call from Currys After-Sales (as will become clear later, Currys do not have a Customer Services department for web orders): there had been a glitch on the system and the cooker was not, in fact, in stock. However, a delivery was coming in on Thursday and we would be contacted either on Friday or Saturday when a new delivery date would be arranged.

Friday happened. We did not receive a phone call. On Saturday, we were again not contacted.

Our problems had begun.

Technorati Tags: cooker, Currys, After-Sales, Customer Services

Possibly related:

• Currys and the cooker, part 2 (delayed)
• “If I ever, ever consider buying something from Currys ever again, shoot me.”
• “Oh. You’re early!”