Believe it or not, the story has a pretty good ending.  Jordan’s and American Leather dealt with a lot of customers with broken zippers, and they finally changed the sofa design to solve the problem.  Now, the seat-back cushions have flaps of cloth on the back with stiff plastic tubes sewn into them, and the tubes are tucked between the sofa frame and the mattress cushion to hold the seat-back cushions in place.  If excessive weight is put on one of the cushions, the tube simply pops out and is tucked in again.  This is an effective, clever solution to the problem.

In response to my letter, Jordan’s offered to refund our $210 and replace our sofa with one with the new design.  The new sofa was delivered last week, and t`he refund check will supposedly arrive later this week.  On the down side, the check was first supposed to arrive several weeks ago, and the woman at Jordan’s we’ve been dealing with ignored two voicemail messages from me asking why it hadn’t, but she did finally respond to email from me this morning and claimed the check would arrive this week.

We did have to pay a little bit for the new sofa.  The Massachusetts sales tax rate was 5% when we bought the first sofa but is 6.25% now.  Since replacements of this sort are handled by Jordan’s as a store credit followed by a new purchase, we had to pay the extra 1.25% in sales tax on the cost of the new sofa.  I’m not upset about this, because the sales tax we had to pay is much less than the $210 they’re refunding, and because although the price of the stain warranty had gone up a lot since we bought our first sofa, Jordan’s agreed to only charge us the original price of the warranty.

We’ve had a number of problems with Jordan’s Furniture over the years.  Over that time, I’ve come to a number of conclusions:

1. The quality of the stuff that Jordan’s sells is fair to middling.
2. You need to do your homework and be an educated consumer when you buy from Jordan’s.  If you don’t, your purchases are likely to end up closer to the middling end than fair.
3. It doesn’t appear to be particularly unusual for something to go wrong with a product bought at Jordan’s.
4. When something does go wrong, they’re pretty good about making it right, especially when you present your case calmly and rationally and make it clear that “no” will not be an acceptable answer.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episodes in the Jordan’s saga… Do we have a Jordan’s PowerCharge account, or don’t we? and The Jordan’s king-size pillow that wasn’t.

Legal Department
Jordan’s Furniture
450 Revolutionary Drive
East Taunton, MA 02718-1369

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to you about a design defect in a piece of furniture sold to me by Jordan’s Furniture. This defect is sufficiently serious and egregious as to violate both the implied warranty of merchantability and warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. After explaining the problem below, I will explain how I expect you to compensate my wife and me for it.

In November 2007, we purchased an American Leather sleeper sofa at your store in Natick, MA. Several months after the sofa arrived, the end of the zipper holding one of the cushions began to separate from the back of the sofa, so we called and scheduled a technician to come look at it.

He said it could not be repaired and the sofa would have to be replaced. The model was no longer available, and rather than replacing our defective sofa with the closest equivalent, you instead gave us a credit for the original purchase price and told us we could use it toward the purchase of a replacement. The problem was that the new model cost $420 more. In other words, you sold us a defective sofa and then expected us to pay over $400 to replace it within their warranty period.

Needless to say, we were unhappy about this, and we complained. A customer service representative agreed for Jordan’s to absorb half of the incremental cost of the replacement sofa, thus reducing our out-of-pocket cost to $210. We accepted this offer with reservations.

Additional details about the events described above are available on my blog at <http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/jordans_warranty>.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when the same zipper on the same cushion on our replacement sofa began to separate from the sofa in exactly the same way. Not only that, but because of the separation, the zipper comes undone when people lean back on the cushion.

Although I have waited until today to contact you about the issue, primarily because I was so annoyed and angry about its recurrence and about the way you handled it the first time, note that this second failure occurred within a year after we purchased the replacement, i.e., within your one-year warranty. I mention this to buttress my claim, but the substance of my complaint does not depend on it; implied warranties of merchantability and fitness are not bound by the time limits in a merchant’s explicit warranty.

It is clear at this point that the failure of the first sofa was not due to a defect in that particular unit, but rather to defective design. The weakest part of the zipper is situated in the middle of the sofa, where the cushions bear the most weight. It simply cannot handle it. In short, we’ve paid almost $2,700 for a sofa whose faulty design guaranteed that it would fail prematurely, i.e., before the end of the reasonable, expected lifetime of the product.

The other cushion does not have this issue because the insertion pin of that cushion’s zipper is located at the end of the sofa rather than in the middle. Through a trivial design change, i.e., making both zippers zip from the end and meet in the middle rather than making both zip in the same direction, the manufacturer could have significantly mitigated the problem. I say “mitigated” rather than “solved,” because even with this suggested change, it is not clear that the zippers chosen by the manufacturer are sufficiently durable to bear the weight of people leaning on the cushions for the life of the sofa.

I urge you to seriously consider the substance of my claims about the defect in this product. I hope that you will work with the manufacturer to remedy it as soon as possible; if that cannot be done, I hope that you will stop selling the product. I am sure you do not want to be in the business of selling expensive furniture which you know to be defective and likely to fail before the end of its useful life.

As for my wife and me, our demands are simple…. If we had known that our replacement sofa was going to break in exactly the same way as the original, we would never have asked for the replacement. Therefore, we expect you to reimburse us, in the form of an actual refund and not a store credit, for the $210 we were forced to pay for the replacement.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

P.S. This letter has been posted on my blog at <http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/american_leather_sofa_defect>.

The American Leather sleeper sofa is more comfortable than “regular” sleepers because it doesn’t have the awful spring-mounted fabric platform that always sags intolerably, and because its foam mattress lasts long and is firmer than the awful folding inner-spring mattresses in most sleepers.

A few months after the sofa arrived, two manufacturing defects became apparent.  First of all, the seams on one of the cushions began to separate.  Second, the zipper that holds that same cushion to the sofa back was installed incorrectly, such that when the zipper is pulled all the way closed, the tab comes off and has to be laboriously threaded back onto the zipper.  This means that the cushion can’t be zipped all the way and is always loose.  We called Jordan’s and asked them to send a repair technician to look at the problems.

The technician addressed the first problem with a sloppy attempt to sew the seam back together with some invisible nylon thread.  The minute I saw it upon my return from work that day, I knew that it was just a matter of time before the seam split again.  As for the zipper problem, the technician claimed that he couldn’t reproduce it (an odd claim, since it happened for me every time I tried to close the zipper firmly) and therefore couldn’t do anything about it.

Knowing that it was only a matter of time before the cushion split again, I figured that I would just wait until then and then call Jordan’s and ask them to send out another technician (I also didn’t call right away to get them to send someone back because I didn’t want my wife to have to waste another half day waiting for them to show up, and because it was a rather busy period for me as well).  Finally, a month or two before the warranty on the sofa wore out, I called and told them to send someone out.  Not only had the seam split once again, and not only was the zipper tab still coming off whenever the zipper was closed all the way, but there was now a third problem: the same, problematic zipper was starting to come loose from the sofa.

Jordan’s sent another technician, who announced that the zipper could not be repaired, so all they could do was replace the entire sofa, but since that particular sofa model had been discontinued, they would instead give me a store credit for the full purchase price and I could visit the store to pick out a replacement.

I thought this was reasonable at the time.  I assumed that American Leather had simply made minor tweaks to their line and I would be able to pick out a replacement very similar to my own for a similar price.  Bad assumption.

I went to Jordan’s a few weeks later and picked out essentially exactly the same sofa.  Same size (queen), same fabric (the cheapest they sell), even the same fabric color.  And yet, even after the saleslady waived the delivery charge for the replacement sofa, it was still going to end up costing me $420 more than the first one did!  I never could have imagined until I saw it with my own eyes that the price of a sofa could go up by $420 (that’s like 20% of the original cost) in less than a year.

I sent Jordan’s an email message telling them that I thought this was completely unacceptable.  I pointed out to them that the first time we called them about the problems was only a few months after we bought the sofa, so surely it was still available for replacement at that time, and yet their technician failed to fix the problems.  I pointed out to them that under their supposed warranty I was being forced to pay $420 to get a replacement for essentially exactly the same sofa I had bought a year ago.  I told them I didn’t think I should be penalized for the fact that the manufacturer had discontinued the model, and finally, I pointed out that it wasn’t like I had the option to select a cheaper replacement, since the sofa I bought was literally the only one of its kind in their entire merchandise line.

One of their customer service representatives called me back a few days later and offered to split the difference with me, i.e., to give me an additional credit of $210, so that the replacement sofa would cost us only $210 instead of $420.

I accepted their offer with reservations.  I told them that I still felt that the only reason I was being forced to pay for a new sofa was because they had mishandled my previous reports about the problem, and that I didn’t think it was fair or appropriate to penalize a customer because a manufacturer discontinued the customer’s item while it was still under warranty.  I reminded them that there was literally not even one other sofa in their entire store that I could have selected as a replacement that had the same features as the one I had originally purchased.  And finally, I pointed out that if I were to laptop computer, it broke whiole under warranty, and my original model was no longer available, the manufacturer would provide me with a newer model even if it was more expensive (and, indeed, exactly this has happened to me before).

Nothing doing — the rep. insisted that splitting the difference was the best he could do.

Now, I’m glad they did that much.  I have to admit that they were probably legally entitled not to do even that.  This certainly isn’t the worst customer-service experience I’ve ever had.  Still, I can’t help but feel that they should have and could have done better.

P.S. When we bought the sofa, they gave us a handful of tokens for the candy machines in their business office, and we didn’t them all.  I learned when I returned to pick out the replacement that the candy machines are gone.  Does anybody have any creative suggestions for what to do with the tokens?