ear-fung.us I’m a programmer. I’m also pro-grammar.

Badcock Lives Up to the First Part of its Name – BAD

I've been putting off purchasing a dining room suite since I moved form Florida to North Carolina about 5 months ago. So that room, just to the right of the front door to our house, has sat empty for too long.

WeMy wife finally decided to get the ball rolling and searched online for the style/look we wanted for our formal dining room. The only thing that was even close to the Pottery Barn set Dana liked was at Badcock (& More!).

Last Saturday we went down to the Greensboro store (according to Google: 19.6 mi – about 23 mins). We searched through the surprisingly large showroom but couldn't find the piece we were looking for. So I asked an associate for help. The store was severely understaffed for a Saturday afternoon but we were soon helped and told that they didn't have that set in the store, but would use their computer systems to look up other stores in the area that did.
My wife and I were informed that the store in Burlington had it out on the showroom floor and they called to verify that, yes, they did have it in the store.

After a bit of deliberation because of the distance, we drove from Greensboro to the Burlington Badcock (21.8 mi – about 26 mins). Instead of looking around we headed straight to the customer service desk to talk to "Chris" who had told the Greensboro store employee they had the furniture set.

I can't begin to tell you the agony I felt when "Chris" said he "misheard" the woman on the phone and mistakenly though we were looking for a living room set with a similar name. They look it up in their computer... they indeed have two of the chairs so the manager goes into the back to look for the chairs.

Luckily Badcock sells big screen TVs so my wife sat down and watched about 45 minutes of Shrek 2 while I was busy sorting this out... yes, 45 minutes. It turns out that the chairs were in inventory but had been ordered by a customer and never picked up from the warehouse which was then applied back to that store's inventory list even though it wasn't in the store. Great.

I'll never buy anything from Badcock because to add insult to injury, the store manager was trying to convince me that I was having a "great" day because there was not a lot of traffic. "It's good traffic as long as you're not standing still" and "What a beautiful day for a drive" were some of stupid phrases I heard come out of this man's mouth.

I drove 79.6 miles on Saturday (43.6 of them were for absolutely nothing). On the way home on a whim we stopped at Ashley Furniture and bought a dining room set with more pieces, that we liked better, and that cost less than the one at Badcock.

EAT IT, BADCOCK.