I've made the mistake of buying from an online retailer with a short name before, with disastrous results (thanks for nothing, lousy Buy.com,) but the jokers at Blair.com are real scammers in ways I couldn't have even imagined. Order hasn't materialized, tracking numbers never work, and the telephone help is rude at best… good work, guys!
One morning I woke up and just really wanted to buy a new piece of clothing. Not just any piece, but a specific one. I searched online and found it at Blair.com, and at a pretty decent price. I paid for ground shipping, which was fair considering the lack of sales tax. But two weeks later, the item hadn't shown up.
I tried repeatedly to track the item online, without success. I called, and after a brief foray through the phone tree, I was connected with a real human being. That's good, right? Kind of depends what comes next, but read on as you must, and trust me, it isn't good at all.
I was told that even though it had been two weeks, the item hadn't been shipped yet. The lady told me in extremely rude terms that the company had been forced to shut down for 6 days to convert to a new inventory tracking system. It struck me as odd that a system conversion couldn't be done in a weekend, and worse still that the site wouldn't mention it when an item is ordered.
But what was really odd was how abrasive the customer care lady was when I called. She was nothing short of mean about the inexcusable delay. I asked what the shipping time would be on an order placed that day, and she said it would go right out, but that my order from weeks earlier would still not go out for a week, but she couldn't give me a timeline.
Then she gave me a new invoice number for tracking purposes, but told me it might not work for a few days while the new system gets up to speed… it's been 6 more days, and the tracking number doesn't work. No, the order tracking page still gives the same bogus error message it did before.
The tracking page doesn't actually track anything, by the way. I had our tech guy dig in to the code and check it out. It's just a page that parses numbers. If it doesn't comply with what you put in, which it won't because they give you bogus numbers, it kicks it back as invalid. If it does comply, it says it's temporarily unavailable.
I tried calling them again this morning at 9:10am Eastern Time, and got the message that their call volumes are so high I should try calling again later… really? At that hour? Not even a hold queue?
Many consumers have complained that merchandise is of unacceptably low quality standards, and others have said it simply never comes, or that they're charged multiple times for single items (seeall the links above in this article.)
Bottom line is you should just avoid doing business with them.
And I wasn't the only one ripped off by Blair.com, it seems this is their standard practice. In fact, I even found people telling the same story of being told that items were backordered, or the system was offline.
It's the modern era. Can't we just put clowns like this out of business already?
