I Want My Stuff

Me vs. Pottery Barn. So far, Pottery Barn is winning.

There is a tiny genre of work created by customers concerning their alleged mistreatment by giant corporations. Among these are Dave Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars music video, chronicling the destruction of his prized Taylor guitar by United Airlines, and the brilliant Yours is a Very Bad Hotel presentation, going after a Doubletree Club hotel that ignored a reservation. The following is my modest contribution, perhaps, to this canon.

This morning, after a bumpy night’s attempted sleep, I woke up, made coffee, patted Koda and as usual, turned on my computer and checked my email.

There was a message from Pottery Barn. At about 12:30 this morning, long after I’d hit the sack, my two Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown that should complement my dresser and my bed beautifully, were delivered. Apparently in the middle of the night.

No, they fucking weren’t.

What was delivered was yet another bullet in a long-running battle between me and a gigantic, faceless corporate entity.

This is my story.

I moved into my new place, basically without any furniture, on November 10, 2024. On November 15, I fired up my laptop, and feeling kind of antsy about spending the coming weeks living like a badger, bought some stuff from Pottery Barn. I paid my money, and assumed because it was, you know, Pottery Barn, that my purchases would arrive reasonably soon, that they would be of reasonable quality, and that I could check “Nightstands” off my mental list. I could, in other words, stop using a stool I bought at Wal-Mart for fifteen bucks to hold my glasses, clock and reading light.

The current nightstand.

I actually thought that.

I’m a complete rookie at buying furniture. Since then, I have learned a few things, the (very) hard way about this game.

First, there is an immense amount of junk being sold out there. Think of particleboard held together with industrial glue, and covered with plastic veneer that’s supposed to look like wood. This is Ikealand, the bottom of the furniture food chain.

On the other end of the scale, there’s custom-made furniture. This stuff is really, really expensive, but it’s also beautiful, made by a human, and intended to last forever. It’s made of real, say, walnut or cherry or oak or whatever. The single example of this in my new home is my dining room table, which is being built as I type this. It cost a lot, but I think it’s worth it. If it isn’t, expect another essay about that.

I shall dine on this elegant surface.

Off to the side, there’s used furniture, available on Facebook Marketplace, for example. This is older, higher-quality stuff, from estate sales or people moving or clearing out their attics or whatever. It’s usually made of actual wood, as was the custom in the old days. You have to hunt and improvise and, oh, yes, you can get ripped off if you don’t inspect the goods personally. I purchased a display cabinet this way which is absolutely beautiful, and a genuine bargain. I inspected it first, and the guy who sold it to me turned out to be the brother of a high-school classmate. He also delivered, which was wonderful. Thanks, Scott.

I also, however, bought a couch this way, made the mistake of trusting the seller, and was rewarded with a piece of furniture so filthy I had to have it professionally cleaned. Thanks, Lexington. Lesson: trust, but verify. Or as my mother would say – and she really would say this – trust your mother, but cut the cards yourself.

And then, in the middle, like some enormous swamp inhabited by biting flies and snakes, humid and steaming in the sun, is the world of retail furniture. Pottery Barn is here. Pottery Barn has made me a profoundly unhappy customer. And as I type this, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Oh, and apparently I’m not alone in this. I was emailing back and forth about all this with a friend in Boston, and she said this: And one last thing about companies like Pottery Barn not doing what they are supposed to. I feel your pain. I ordered your basic mission coffee table in 2022 and it was delivered a year later and no one seemed to care. No recourse. The pandemic was no longer an excuse. Many companies sit on their laurels and think that they do not have to perform because what are people going to do anyhow?

Here's how I think this all went:

Pottery Barn gets my money. Online and upfront, I might add. Nothing happens with these people until you hand over the dough. Then and only then do they tell their suppliers to manufacture my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown. Based on some research, I think they were manufactured in Indonesia. They’re made of mango wood, which the website takes pains to mention is “sustainable”. Okay.

Some laborer puts together my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown. In my case, Pottery Barn doesn’t actually make my furniture. They market it. Someone else makes it.

I wonder what a farmhouse in Indonesia looks like.

My Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown are then loaded on a freighter and shipped across the Pacific Ocean. Let’s say they’re unloaded in Long Beach. They’re then shipped across the country, I assume on a train, parked in a warehouse, and eventually handed off to the company that’s going to ship them the last mile to me, an outfit in Canada, which make sense, sort of, given that I live not too far from the border.

Hey, look! It’s my nightstands!

This company delivers all sorts of shit, as well as handling residential moves, business moving, all of it. They have warehouses and trucks and offices everywhere, it seems. And if I look online, something becomes immediately and glaringly apparent. Their Google online reviews are awful. Same thing on Reddit. Many of their customers are infuriated. Their Google review scores average out to a 2.5. Here’s an example of a negative one:

Absolute nightmare. They scheduled 12 delivery dates and never arrived on any occasion. We’d get a delivery estimate, stay home from work to receive it, then it would never arrive. When you call, they don’t answer. We reached the point where our items were past the return window from the seller, and we still had no knowledge that they even existed. Here I am, three months later, out of time off from work, and still no delivery. Using this business to deliver for you would be an absolute insane decision. By far the worst experience I’ve had with a company. Ever.

My experience with them delivering my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown bears this out. Mind you, they’re the ones who are actually responsible for making sure I get what I already paid for. Pottery Barn picked them, negotiated with them, and signed a contract with them for this. Way to go, Pottery Barn.

Delivery was supposed to be Friday. The day before, I get an email from asking me to confirm the delivery date and time window. January 17, from 2:30 to 4:30. Fair enough. Sure, I confirm instantly. The software thanks me, which is nice, kind of. The delivery guy, they tell me, will be named Brian.

On the Big Day, the day when I’m supposed to receive my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown, I’m actually excited, which may explain why I’m so pissed off now. I move other furniture. I clear a path. I’m finally going to have a fully furnished apartment, apart from the dining table. I’ll have a home.

I start getting text messages – they have my phone number – telling me that my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown are going to be delivered a little late. The time starts slipping but Brian, over the afternoon, is 5 stops away. Then 4. 3. 2. Finally, 1. I’m next!

And then, time stops. Everything stops. In an abundance of caution, I am out on the sidewalk waiting, to make sure I don’t miss Brian. Neighbors, people walking dogs, stop and chat. “Hey, what are you doing out here?” “I’m waiting for furniture to be delivered.” I make sure my phone is working. I check for updates about once every five minutes. It’s cold — I go inside for a minute to get a down coat, then return to my post.

And Brian simply never shows up. I wait until 6:15, a solid hour after he was supposed to appear. As the minutes tick by, the tracking site keeps mindlessly repeating that Brian is 1 stop away. And then, choking on frustration and rage, I give up. No messages, texts, anything. Brian and my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown simply fall off the radar.

I got this at 5:47, telling me that Brian will arrive at 5:15.

I call Pottery Barn. I get some tired-sounding guy in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who tells me he’s going to “put an alert in the system” about all this. What the hell is that? I call the customer service number at AMJ, and get voicemail. And that is that. I have no idea what to do next, who to call, anything. I go to bed angry and disappointed, and have bad dreams.

And then, this morning, the coup de grace. An email telling me that, yay, my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands, in Sienna Brown have been delivered! Enjoy your furniture, Peter! It’s been great doing business with you.

Except they fucking haven’t.

And the more I think about this, the more ugly truths start to march out and stand there, like Orcs in The Lord of the Rings.

First is the sickening realization that this entire tangled mess is now my problem. Pottery Barn apparently does not care if I receive my stuff, like, ever. I am going to have to make all kinds of phone calls, take notes, use charm and pity and threats and whatever else I can gin up to try to get someone to do something. But I have now been handed the job of cleaning up a mess I not only didn’t make, but paid someone else not to make.

Second is the also sickening realization that Pottery Barn is a gigantic legal entity – it’s not a person – that is all about marketing and sales, and I fell for it. I fell for it. I fell for it because I really wanted those nightstands, and that made me lower my guard.

I know better. I should know better. A friend of mine spent several years as a designer for Pottery Barn, creating towels and rugs and whatnot. As she described it, she worked with some demanding, tremendously talented people, the absolute best in the field. Two common criticisms she received at this job when someone didn’t love her designs were (insert Eastern European accent here):

Expected: translation – not edgy enough. Try again.
It Needs to Have a Point of View – same

These are both classic criticisms of designers, the kind of thing emitted by design managers who really know their stuff.

Pottery Barn is all about design and marketing. They’re about selling stuff. They created an absolutely gorgeous web page depicting and describing my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown and I was seduced by it. I mean, look at this. This is terrific marketing. It worked on me, and I like to think of myself as pretty bulletproof.

Look at that! I want that life. The books — enough to indicate that you read, but you’re not some weird, reclusive oddball. The perfectly placed, clean glass of water that doubtless came from an elegant-but-modern pitcher. The tasteful black-and-white photo of you and your beloved, canoodling in what looks like a jungle? Romantic and adventurous. The big, cool lamp. The sunlight beautifully dappling your Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstand In Sienna Brown, next to equally tasteful Pottery Barn linens on your matching Pottery Barn bed.

The farmhouse this is in obviously belongs to someone with a trust fund. It’s mid-morning, a gentle breeze is ruffling the curtains, the sun is shining and you’re going to go sit on a beautiful bench in an orchard with an apple and a book. Nobody who owns a Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstand in Sienna Brown is overweight, or has a problem with their kids, or can’t remember where they put the damn car keys.

This is a company that does a world-class job of marketing stuff, and convincing people they should buy it. The actual specifics of getting them what they bought? Not so much.

It's also why, as I type this, I’ve been on the phone with Pottery Barn’s customer service people for just under an hour, and counting.

So here I sit. On hold. Waiting for some customer service supervisor who apparently is quite busy, to get around to speaking with me about why my Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstands in Sienna Brown aren’t here. This absurd phone call included, by the way, a request that I go outside and look for it. They want to make sure I’m not so stupid that I’d sit on the phone for an hour over something the size of a couple of nightstands that I just didn’t notice. Because they don’t want me to waste their time.

On the one hand, it’s tempting to quote Bruce Springsteen, and remember that one day, I can look back on this and it will all seem funny. I mean, this kind of thing happens to people all the time. It could be the IRS, Amazon, any of the hundreds of gigantic, lumbering organizations that we all have to grapple with every day. Russian writers have lampooned this kind of thing in their country for decades.

And yet, if I’m honest about it, there’s something kind of awful about this whole story. Making it into a joke or a meme is kind of whistling past the graveyard. Funny/not funny. Because consequences are kept at arm’s length, the company to which I paid money has the latitude to act pretty much as badly as it wants. As carelessly, as deceptively and as shoddily as it can get away with. And – this is the terrible part – they did.

And everything they got away with lands right on me. I’m like some sort of human attack surface. When Pottery Barn contracts with the delivery company, and the delivery company hires Brian, despite the fact that perhaps he’s lazy, or stupid, or sloppy, or mean, or any of a thousand other bad things, who has to make up for all of this? Me. I don’t know if Brian decided to just not bother, or wrecked his truck, or got delayed for hours carrying a couch up to a fourth-floor apartment. I do know that thanks to deciding to do business with Pottery Barn, I now have a problem. I don’t have my furniture, but instead, I have a complex problem.

I also know that if Pottery Barn really wanted to play hardball, there is nothing I could do about this. I am one guy. They are part of Williams-Sonoma, which had revenues of $7 billion. What am I going to do, sue them? Complain to the President? If they decided to simply keep my money and tell me to pound sand, I’m stuck. The feeling of helplessness and vulnerability is awful, but it’s also not wrong.

Worse, much worse, is that not one person in the entire food chain — and I’ve talked to several — has said, “Yes, I know where your Farmhouse 4-Drawer Nightstand in Sienna Brown is, and I’ll take care of getting it to you. After all, you paid for it, you’ve had to wait months, and we have wasted hours of your time.” Instead, they make some little, preprogrammed, symbolic gesture, designed to placate me, to create the illusion that something’s being done, and most importantly, that doesn’t cost them any money.

All the beautiful photography and outstanding copywriting in the world can’t make up for that. I just want what I paid for. And I resent having to struggle to get it.

Postscript: after three tries, my stuff finally showed up. My long nightmare is finally over. And it absolutely kills me to say this, but I have to.

I love it.