aisling of tea

oooh, new tea shops! There aren’t nearly enough of them in the core downtown area where I usually am.

Kensington Market is turning out to be a surprisingly good place to go for teas! And there are tons along Queen Street, we’re going to check out Pippins soon on *Uniquity*’s recommendation.

Aww. Sad.

I’m sad to hear your experience went worse than my own…But on the plus side, your Alice teapot is (hopefully) available at Pippins! Hopefully you can find some more excellent indie stores and make me jealous once again. : )

Uniquity, we tried to spot by Pippins yesterday, actually, I thought of you! We’d never been to that part of Toronto before, it was gorgeous! The teapot there is out of our price range, but we found it elsewhere online. I was just utterly disgusted by the complete lack of customer service. But we look forward to exploring a few more tea shops we’ve found in the area!

I wouldn’t be afraid to let Harney know of their abysmal performance on this front, if I were you. I know you’ve sent e-mails already to them, but to lose not one but many customers (as this is, for the tea community, a pretty “public” gaffe) is something that should be of major concern to them.

I’ve sent many emails, and contacted whoever runs their twitter (I actually got a response there) The twitter convo is as follows:

Me: Utterly disgusted with @HarneyTea. We placed an order on 4/8, still not shipped. Customer Service less than helpful. Canceling our order.

Harney: I apologize for the problems, and our failure to respond to you quickly. Pls. let me know how I can help to make this right.

Me: Improve your international customer service and respond to emails. It shouldn’t take 2 weeks to process an order.

I don’t think anything will actually come of it, but this is just ridiculous. I’m thinking of one last email to customer service, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. I do plan to continue to warn my Canadian friends away from them. The tea is good…but not good enough to make up for this junk.

In other news, had a very nice conversation with the people at Pippins today, I might be getting my teapot there after all!

I’ve gotta say, any US based company (tea related or not) that treats Canadian orders as if they’re going to the moon automatically turns me off. I expect lengthy shipping times and potential customs problems, butas you’ve rightly said before, in some cases we are closer than outlying states. I can imagine how the poor Alaskans and Hawaiians must feel (You know how you always see “Free Shipping! Except to Alaska and Hawaii”…)

Yeah, I put the effort into a long, long e-mail to customer service laying out everything that happened that led me to cancel my order and sent it just now. I hope it’s actually read and I hope they actually do something because this is ridiculous and unneeded. We ordered a box of card games from Steve Jackson Games and it managed to be here in a little over a week, processing and shipping times. There’s no excuse for Canadian orders to be treated as “international” orders. In fact, on their website, International is defined as “outside the US or Canada”.

Blegh. I am so completely turned off by this company that I’m not sure I’d ever order from them again, even if they did clean up their act.