Boots Kitchen Appliances

I cannot stress strongly enough that you should not ever consider buying from Boots Appliances. In short, they delivered the wrong appliance, on the wrong day, with a dent - and we have had to pay extra for the privilege. It has one star in the rating as you can't give it none.

We ordered a new fridge freezer in mid July, for delivery on a Monday in Mid-August. Despite a phone call on the Thursday before and an e-mail on the Friday morning confirming the delivery on the Monday, we returned from a weekend away on the Sunday afternoon to find a voicemail on our home phone left at ten to 6 on the Friday night saying that they didn't have the fridge freezer to deliver. And guess what - customer services was closed until Monday morning. Even better, the stock control line didn't open until 11am on the Monday morning. I should have realised their attitude to customer service there and then.

My husband and I - who had both taken the day of work for this delivery - then spent the day battling with Boots to try to get them to send us a replacement ASAP - fridges and freezers being quite useful in the middle of the summer (even a British one!). The best they could do was send us a different make and model - which we had to search their website for - and it was going to cost us and extra £100. It took a further 4 phone calls with various levels of incompetent managers without an ounce of initiative between them to even get them to knock off the slightest amount of money as a good will gesture - the first offer was a generous £10. I wasn't feeling much goodwill to be honest.

With delivery arranged for the Friday we thought all was sorted until it turned out that neither of us could take that day off after all. A quick call to Boots Appliances and delivery was rearranged to the Saturday (at an extra cost to us of course!). Maybe they aren't so useless after all? No such luck, on the Friday morning as we are leaving for work, we get a phone call - the delivery man who is apparently half an hour away. Calls to customer services to correct yet another error at their end lead to us being told that we had to take delivery or it was going back to Manchester and wouldn't be available for delivery on the day we had specified! So, another morning off work for me and a nice big dent in the door for the fridge freezer as it is delivered. Great.

The final chapter in this catalogue of errors is that, a month after it was delivered, I am still battling to get my advantage points added to my account - ironically the points were the reason we chose to order through Boots Appliances.

Not once have we had any acknowledgement of the financial cost to us - both through being forced to buy a more expensive fridge freezer and the loss of holiday days. Or a genuine apology. I mean, it isn't like we were asking much, from a service provider? Is it?