Shopping is usually a pain-free experience, but not always. Sometimes a taped-up package hides a nasty surprise …
Big department stores are one of the conveniences of modern life that most of us use without much thinking about it.
We're fortunate to live fairly close to an IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings store where things are decent and often surprisingly inexpensive. Most of the time, shopping at IKEA is easy and (dare I say it) fun, but the last purchase we made from there didn't work out as planned.
Shopping IKEA to keep bettas happy
Our daughter has some bettas. I don't really swoon over them, but she has a heart for them, so there you go.
Bettas are properly called Siamese fighting fish. They're basically the fighting cocks of the fish world.
They're mean. They don't get along well with most other kinds of fish. We bought a snail and some neon tetras to put in there, and the bettas attacked the crud out of them.
They don't much get along with other bettas. We had to separate them because they attacked the crud out of each other.
These fish even try to attack the crud out of themselves! We inherited an aquarium and desired to put it in the bathroom our daughter uses. This place was between the two sinks in the bathroom, and on the wall was … a big mirror.
The fish saw their reflection in the mirror and freaked out. (My daughter has a heart for them. I keep telling myself this.)
So to fix this mirror “problem” my wife went to IKEA to get two smaller mirrors so that the bettas wouldn't see themselves. Going without mirrors wasn't really an option, because our daughter is a teenager, and needs some kind of mirror in there, of course.
These mirrors were hard to get
Or rather: She went to IKEA to try to get two smaller mirrors.
First, she stalked these mirrors online to make sure that they were in stock at our local IKEA. (And by “local” we mean “an hour's drive one way;” our state only has one IKEA.)
They were out of stock quite a bit. When they were in stock, there was only one or two available.
This week, she went up to get them. There were only two there, and one of the packages was taped up.
Getting the taped-up box turned out to be a mistake.
When she got it home, some of the hardware was missing. Whoever returned it (we can only assume) didn't return the whole thing, and IKEA put it back out to resell, incomplete.
IKEA, to their credit, gave my wife a full refund when she took it back. But that was after driving two hours round-trip — again — and coming home empty-handed because they were out of stock.
Wishing you many (unhappy) returns
Bigger stores like IKEA generally have fairly lenient return policies. They consider it a cost of business to not give customers a giant headache when they return an item.
Accepting an item for return is one thing. But if the store resells the item for the full retail price, then the entire item should be there, right?
One would hope that the store would Do The Right Thing and check the item to make sure that it's all there.
Maybe they goofed. That's the best case.
Maybe they didn't take the time to check thoroughly. There's a fair bit of detail work in checking every screw, fastener, and lock nut against what's in the instructions.
Maybe they didn't check at all, or said, “Yeah, the parts are there.”
The worst case (and I don't believe that they'd do this) would be that they did check, and decided consciously to try to sell it anyway.
In any case, buying an incomplete item is a sunk cost. It costs to return the item. Alternatively, it costs to “make do” and cobble together something that does work.
It's a risk, then, whether to buy something that's obviously been returned and repackaged. It's best to pick packages that look intact.
