Groupon lies about over charging on Clouds Memory Foam offer

I recently purchased four memory foam pillows on Groupon from the company ‘Clouds Memory Foam’. The Groupon offer gave a great discount by offering 4 pillows for £55, instead of £239.96 – with just a £4.99 delivery charge (as you can see from the link).

However, when I came to place the order the delivery charge was £10 – not £4.99. As you only have a limited time to redeem your Groupon vouchers I had little choice but to pay the £10 and quibble about it later.

Knowing Groupon as I do (I’ve never had a transaction go without a hitch of some kind) I tweeted them immediately about the issue, and received an instant response saying to email their UK support team, which I did.

However – I received the following reply from Groupon’s email support:

Pal, Sep-27 00:05 (BST):
Hi Darren,
Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you were charged £10.00 delivery fee for your Clouds Memory Foam Pillows.
I have checked our system and cannot find any other customers being charged this amount.
Please find below the contact number for the partner, to request a refund for this fee:
Phone Numbers: (+44) 203 086 7423 & (+44) 207 760 7562
Email: contact@cloudsmemoryfoam.com
Also did you follow the below procedure to place your order:
– Go to www.cloudsmemoryfoam.co.uk/bedding/pillows-3/super-deluxe-memory-foam-pillow-1
– In the checkout, enter your voucher codes
– Have your credit/debit card details ready to pay the £4.99 postage

It was the ‘I have checked our system and cannot find any other customers being charged this amount’ that interested me, as this means they have checked, and nobody else has been charged £10 for delivery – except of course that they have, and Groupon has lied. Not only has Groupon lied about this, they have knowingly attempted to deceive as they have indeed checked, and have sent me exactly the same email as someone else has already received – so they looked up the problem, found someone else had reported the same problem, saw the email they had already sent to them, and then forwarded it to me.

Pal, Sep-26 23:27 (BST):
Hi Lianne,
Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you were charged £10.00 delivery fee for your Clouds Memory Foam Pillows.
I have checked our system and cannot find any other customers being charged this amount.
Please find below the contact number for the partner, to request a refund for this fee:
Phone Numbers: (+44) 203 086 7423 & (+44) 207 760 7562
Email: contact@cloudsmemoryfoam.com
Also did you follow the below procedure to place your order:
– Go to www.cloudsmemoryfoam.co.uk/bedding/pillows-3/super-deluxe-memory-foam-pillow-1
– In the checkout, enter your voucher codes
– Have your credit/debit card details ready to pay the £4.99 postage

How disgusting is that? They must have known for a fact that someone else had been charged the £10 in order to send me the exact same email. Groupon clearly can’t be trusted. Mistakes happen, that’s a fact of life. When a website becomes as successful as Groupon has become these mistakes will be more frequent, but it’s how you deal with these mistakes that sets you apart – and to knowingly lie to customers marks you out as a company that simply cannot be trusted.

I wonder what Groupon will come back with now, following this response:

That’s funny, because someone else has received this exact same email from you (GroupOn code error (ticket #906501)).

Seems you’re lying through your arse on this one. How many people have you sent this exact same email to, claiming nobody else has been charged £10?

This is a disgraceful lie that has been found out. I suggest you tread very carefully with the way you reply to this.

I await the next chapter with bated breath.

My old football trophies

While packing up some of the mountains of crap that I have collected over the years this week, I came across three football trophies that I won as a teenager. Now, don’t start thinking that I was any good at the game, I wasn’t, as the nature of the football trophies will show.

Rather than winning awards for ‘player of the season’ or ‘top goal scorer’ (I actually never scored, well, at the right end anyway) I instead won the following three awards in the two seasons I played for my local team:

  • Clubman of the Year
  • Most Improved Player
  • Most Improved Player

Let’s start with the ‘Clubman of the Year’ award first. This is the award you give to someone for, basically, turning up. I turned up every week, even for training, and didn’t cry off for any reason – therefore I got a trophy… nice.

This award was of course nowhere near as bad as winning the ‘Most Improved Player’ award… twice.

Just how bad do you have to be to win a trophy for improvement two years in a row? The level of the team was fairly low to begin with, and I was, in fairness, the worst player there when I started. We regularly lost games 6-0 (ironically in one of those games I scored an own goal and won man of the match) and we never went higher than second from bottom in the league.

We actually made it through to the semi-final of the cup in the second year, after receiving a bye in the first round and beating the worst team in the league in the quarter final – quite a cup-run. We lost the semi-final though, badly, to St Julians and a player who was reportedly the cousin of Nathan Blake (a former Cardiff City player).

Anyhow – I have football trophies, something every man should have from their youth. I just don’t have to tell everyone exactly what they’re for… assuming they don’t read this of course.

HDNL driver crashes through gate

This video was added in one of the comments on a post about HDNL had rebranded to YODEL to escape all of the bad press they have been receiving – and clearly it’s working if this dissatisfied customer is anything to go by. While waiting for a delivery from Amazon (who really should consider dropping HDNL/YODEL when they get tarred with the same brush) the customer’s CCTV caught the delivery driver ‘attempt’ to open the gates to his driveway, before giving up and forcing his van through the gap – damaging both the van and gates.

What sort of utter moron does this? Good work from YODEL – I wonder how long it will be before they rebrand again.

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