As I sat down, my chair flung me backwards, in which I hit my knees on the keyboard drawer. As I’m sure you can imagine, I was not happy. I work from home and I have to say I’m hard on chairs. I have back and knee issues that make me sensitive to changes, much less totally breaking. After an incident 2 years ago with Office Max, where I spent $300 on a chair to have the hydrolics break the first week and their idea of insurance was to mail me a new chair piece by piece to determine what piece was broken, I decide to try Office Depot.

(Let me insert here that I am not an affiliate for Office Depot, was not asked to provide any feedback and I don’t really know anyone that works there aside from a casual hi with the girl that usually checks out my purchases.)

Step 1: October 3rd- I called Office Depot, where I bought my very nice orthopedic chair last year. My call was answered promptly. The lady was very nice while I tried to make her understand what my chair was doing that shouldn’t while I sat in my office floor to call her. She told me their policy was to have items returned for warranty inspection. However see as this was a large, very broken item, that I needed to retrieve my mailing label, and UPS a copy of my receipt with a signed note about what happened and that it was too big to mail. Ok. Strange but fair enough.

After I got off the phone, I got in my file drawer to find that the thermal receipt for the chair had rubbed very faint and I could not get a good copy. (Thinking great.)

Step 2: October 4th- I went into the local Office Depot where I purchased the chair. The really nice guy at the service desk gave me the number to the receipt retrieval department.

My assistant called receipt retrieval. I paid for the chair with a now-expired card and the receipt couldn’t be located. The poor lady even dug through the records manually but she was nice and very polite. (Thinking Oh great because my assistant wasn’t much more optimistic.)

Step 3: October 5th- I picked the clearest copy of the poor receipt. Wrote a note with all the numbers I could more visibly see on the original, everything else asked for and packaged it in a manila envelope to mail.

Went to the UPS store. Got a sermon from the UPS lady because apparently you cannot UPS a manila envelope. UPS lady repackaged my two sheets of paper when she could clearly see I didn’t care.

Waiting: So I went home, thinking great this is going to be a fight. I can see them calling me to tell me the receipt isn’t clear enough and they can’t find the transaction. I was busy and they had told me to expect to hear from them in 6-8 weeks so I pushed it to the back of my mind.

October 24th- Checked mail after long day. Envelope from Office Depot Product Replacement. I thought “Ok, here’s the letter asking for more information.” Imagine my surprise when I find a nice form letter and my $200 replacement gift card, especially after only 3 weeks.

I have to say that I was blown away by how courteous and polite everyone was during this claim (expect the UPS woman and Office Depot’s most definitely not to blame for that.) I guess it surprises me more that I spoke to several people in several different locations and they were all nice, prompt and seemed genuinely to want to help. I really expected to have some long drawn out fight that ended up with me having an expensive chair out of pocket, not because of Office Depot themselves, but from past experiences with other retailers. The  simple, honesty and easy experience shines because they simply did what they said they’d do.

As I said, I’m a small business owner. According to my books, I spent $1800 last year on office supplies. I’m pretty sure Office Depot’s made me a life long customer.

Erica

Photo Credit Flickr:  Lars Plougmann