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Of all the newsletters and blogs I read, it’s amazing that the one thing giving me the most fodder for my blog posts is my wedding. Perhaps I’m just self absorbed

With five and a half months to go, my fiance and I have been creating our registries (as those who have been reading my posts know). We settled on The Bay and were debating Home Outfitters when that decision was made for us based on a bad experience.

One thing you have to realize if you haven’t created a registry before, is that (at the Bay) they give you a scanner and you get to run around the store and zap everything you want; which was fun for all of five minutes and then completely overwhelming. On another tangent, the Bay really needs to work on their online registry system. I wish I could add or delete items online, unfortunately all you can do is change quantities. After that you either have to go in store, or email the registry consultants and ask them to do this for you.

So needless to say, I decided to look for a place where we could register online and add to our registry from the comfort of our couch and laptop. Being a good fiancee myself, I thought some place with tools would be good. So I checked out Home Depot, only to find out you can’t create a registry online there. BOO. So my fingers typed in Canadian Tire’s website and you could not only create your registry online but add and delete items as well. YAY.

I had fun adding items and was pleased as punch to tell my fiance how much I’d thought of him, adding a new lawn mower, a snowblower and various other tools for our many home improvement projects on the go.

Once he reviewed and deleted some of the things I’d added – after asking exactly what home reno projects I had in store for him once we were officially hitched – we sent off announcements of our registries through our wedding website (thanks Wedding Bells) to friends and family.

We were quite happy to have checked one more item off our list of things to do. Then, on Friday afternoon (less than five days after I created our registry), I get an email from Canadian Tire, advising me that unfortunately they are doing away with their gift registry program after May 31 and anyone who has an event after May 31 (which mine is) will have to close their registry. But if I confirm my address with them in the next two weeks before closing my registry, they’ll mail me a gift for my understanding.

My understanding? I don’t have any. I spent (read: wasted) hours of my time creating that thing and they are doing away with it just like that? Now I can see if perhaps I had made my registry months ago – but within one week? That’s just bad customer service.

The right thing to do would have been to say that anyone who had registered to this point would have their regsitries honoured and that anyone adding a new event up to May 31 would be allowed to do so. Or maybe a personalized email or phone call apologizing for the fact that they let me create the registry in the first place. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a snap decision, so it would have been nice to have a little warning, or not be allowed to register period – and couch it in being down site maintenance or something of that nature.

Anyone from Canadian Tire, if you’re reading this, please either rethink this and reinstate all of us who are now put out, or send me a snowblower as my gift…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 am and is filed under Integrated marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.