The guard rail for the loft bed, whose purpose is to keep children from falling out of the bed, looks like this:

As you can see, three vertical posts connected to the bed support two horizontal rails.

Given the safety-critical nature of the guard rail, one would expect the vertical posts to be fastened quite strongly to the bed frame. Unfortunately, they are not.

The strongest way to secure the posts would be to put at least two thick wood screws through each one directly into the frame. Unfortunately, that’s not how they are secured. Rather, a metal bracket is screwed separately into the posts and frame:

Two screws on the top arm of the bracket go through the post, and two screws on the bottom arm of the bracket go through the frame.

This design is inherently problematic. The use of metal brackets leaves the rail vulnerable to the same metal fatigue issues I encountered in the ladder brackets. Furthermore, because the brackets allow the rail to be wobbled back and forth, the screws can eventually worm their way out of the wood. This is exactly what happened to one of the three brackets on our bed:

Fortunately, we noticed it and put in new screws, but the fact that this was able to occur at all is problematic. Safety-critical components like ladders and guard rails simply must be built strongly enough to prevent things like this from happening.

I can understand why Pulaski used metal brackets in this context: they make it easier to assemble the bed. However, the right way to use metal brackets here would have been for the two bottom screws, the ones that go through the bed frame, to be long enough to go all the way through the frame and into the post on the other side. For ease of installation, pilot holes could have been drilled in the post opposite the bottom bracket holes.

This change would have almost certainly prevented the screws on our bed from coming out, since it would have made the rail much more secure and less prone to wobbling. Furthermore, it would have doubled the number of screws securing the rail to the frame, such that even if the screws did come out, it would be far less dangerous.

It is quite distressing to see a manufacturer of children’s furniture skimping on safety.

I bought a king-size “Nature’s Rest” latex pillow.  Here’s the box it came in:

Notice how the front of the box clearly says that this is a king-size pillow.  So does the label on top of the box:

The pillow came rolled up tightly inside the box.  The Jordan’s associate who sold it to me warned me that it could take as much as a week for it to expand to its full size.  I was therefore only somewhat concerned when I got home and unpacked the pillow and discovered that it was significantly shorter than every other king-size pillow my wife and I have ever owned.  Not only that, but it was significantly shorter than the pillow cover that came in the box with it.

When it was still too short several weeks later, I brought it back to Jordan’s, along with one of our old king-size pillows to demonstrate the difference in length, and showed them both to a woman who claimed to be a manager in the mattress department.  She insisted that it wasn’t finished expanding yet and I should just give it more time.

Well, guess what, lady… it’s now almost two months after I brought it home, and it’s still not king-size; in fact, its length has remained pretty much the same since the day I bought it.  Here’s the new pillow in all 30 inches of its glory, with the extra, unfilled pillow cover tucked underneath it:

Here you can see how the pillow cover is several inches longer than the pillow (the yard stick is lying flat on the bed against the edge of the pillow inside the cover):

In comparison, here’s my old pillow:

and here’s the one I used before that one:

Why is the length of a king-size pillow important?  Because it’s supposed to fill about half the length of a king-size bed, that’s why.  Here are my old and new pillows against the headboard of my bed:

See the difference?

When it became clear to me that my pillow was not going to get any longer, I decided to do a bit of research to find out whether it was I or Jordan’s who was confused about pillow sizes, so I pulled up a browser window and googled for “pillow sizes.” Lo and behold, four of the first six matches asserted that king-size pillows are supposed to be 20 inches wide and 36 inches long, and I couldn’t find a single page asserting a smaller size than that.  I wasn’t imagining things — Jordan’s really did sell me a king-size pillow that isn’t.

Now, you might think that this was simply a mistake.  After all, the pillow itself doesn’t have a size marked on it, and they presumably intended for the pillow cover to fit the pillow, so they must have simply put the wrong pillow in the box.  That’s what I thought, too, until I dug up the receipt for our two pillows while preparing to return mine to Jordan’s and found this printed on it:

Yes, you’re reading that right, the receipt explicitly indicates that my pillow is 31 inches long and 16.75 inches wide.  In other words, Jordan’s knowingly sold me a pillow labeled “king-size” which is neither long enough nor wide enough to qualify as a king-size pillow.  The width I can forgive, but the length is beyond the pale.

You might wonder, then, why I bought it in the first place.  Well, (a) those dimensions don’t appear anywhere on the box, (b) I wasn’t given a copy of the receipt until after I’d already bought the pillow, (c) it did not occur to me at the time that I would actually have to check to see if the pillow which Jordan’s claimed was king-size was in fact king-size, and (d) I didn’t know how long king-size pillows are supposed to be until I looked it up afterwards, and (e) even if I’d taken the pillow out of the box and observed that it was too short, the associate would have told me that I just needed to give it time to expand to its full size.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, the pillow my wife bought was labeled queen-size, and it’s not long enough either.

It’s things like this that make it seem like Jordan’s is in the business of making money by getting away with whatever they can without most people noticing.  If it were only my decision, this would be enough to convince me to buy our new mattress elsewhere, but my wife is set on a particular mattress for which we won’t be able to find an exact duplicate anywhere else.  Such is life.

I will be bringing the pillow back to Jordan’s (along with my old pillow for comparison; a tape measure; and printouts from several Web sites documenting what size king-size pillows are supposed to be) and asking them to take the pillow back and give me a refund.  We’ll see what happens.

UPDATE: Jordan’s took back the too-small pillow and gave me a refund without any trouble, apologized for the inconvenience, and said they would pass on to the appropriate people my feedback about the pillow simply being too small to sell as a king-size pillow.

]]> http://blog.kamens.us/2010/04/14/the-jordans-king-size-pillow-that-wasnt-2/feed/ 0 http://blog.kamens.us/2010/04/13/do-we-have-a-jordan%e2%80%99s-powercharge-account-or-don%e2%80%99t-we/ http://blog.kamens.us/2010/04/13/do-we-have-a-jordan%e2%80%99s-powercharge-account-or-don%e2%80%99t-we/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:36 +0000 jik http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/?p=1322 My wife and I recently visited Jordan’s Furniture to look at mattresses.  While we’ve had our problems with Jordan’s in the past, Mattresses are definitely a commodity item, the Jordan’s “sleep techs” really do seem to know what they’re talking about, and their mattress prices are quite reasonable.

We have a Jordan’s PowerCharge account which we opened several years ago, and we had planned on using it to buy a mattress as well, to get the zero-interest financing.  While we were at the store, we asked their office to check if the account was still active, and they said it was closed after two years of inactivity and we’d have to reapply for a new account.

We reapplied at the kiosk in the store, and we were turned down, because our debt to income ratio is supposedly too high.  This is because we recently replaced our Chase credit card with one from Citizens Bank, and the new card has a six-month zero-interest promotion on it, so we’ve been carrying a high balance on that account which we will pay off completely in about a month but in the meantime makes our credit score look not-so-good.  D’oh!

When we found out why we were turned down, we shrugged our shoulders and said oh well, that’s life, so much for zero-interest financing on the mattress.  Then we made the arrangements I recently wrote about for our sofa to be replaced.

It took several days for the customer service department at the Jordan’s corporate headquarters to enter all the necessary credits for the sofa into their billing system.  They finished a few days before our second mattress-shopping visit to the store, so while we were there, I stopped by the office again to pay the sales tax (see the other article for details) so the sofa could be shipped.

To my surprise, they informed me that the sales tax had already been paid.  I told them that was rather odd, since I certainly hadn’t paid it, and they said, “It says here that it was paid for with a PowerCharge account.  Do you have a PowerCharge account?”  So I told them that as far as we knew, no, we did not have a PowerCharge account, because our old account was closed and our new one was denied.

It turned out that when Jordan’s refunded the cost of our sofa so we could order a replacement, the refund went back onto the account which had originally been used to pay for it, i.e., our old PowerCharge account.  And when the refund was pushed back onto the old, closed PowerCharge account, the account was automatically reopened, even though HSBC, the bank that underwrites PowerCharge accounts, had just rejected us for a new account.  Then, when our replacement sofa order was finalized by the folks at the Jordan’s corporate HQ, the charge for the sales tax was paid by our now reopened PowerCharge account automatically.

We had a PowerCharge account.  Then we didn’t.  And now, apparently, we do again.  But do we really?  When we go to buy our mattress in a couple of weeks, will they accept the replacement PowerCharge card that I just ordered (because I cut up the old one when they told us the account was closed)?  We’ll just have to wait and see.

For a relatively small fee, Jordan’s Furniture used to apply an anti-stain treatment to new upholstered furniture and warranty that if the furniture got stained, they would get the stain out or replace the item at the expense.  Well, actually, it was at the expense of Stainsafe, the company that provided the anti-stain treatment and administered the warranty.

However, in a recent visit to Jordan’s, my wife and I learned that Jordan’s no longer offers anti-stain treatments on new furniture.  This is supposedly motivated by three factors: (1) Jordan’s wants to be an environmentally conscious company, and the anti-stain treatments are bad for the environment; (2) the anti-stain treatments that aren’t bad for the environment don’t work well; and (3) the microfibers used to cover a lot of the furniture sold at Jordan’s have some intrinsic stain resistance.  I suspect there are two more factors that the Jordan’s associate didn’t share with us: (1) there were a lot of complaints about the Stainsafe warranty (google for “Stainsafe” and you’ll see what I mean); and (2) oh, by the way, Stainsafe is bankrupt.  Of course, it’s not clear whether Jordan’s stopped offering Stainsafe because they went bankrupt, or Stainsafe went bankrupt because Jordan’s stopped offering it.

What Jordan’s will sell you, instead of anti-stain treatment, is a five-year limited warranty under an Extended Protection Program (EPP) administered by a third-party company. If you buy the EPP warranty, and your furniture is damaged, and you file the program’s rules exactly, then the company that administers the warranty will supposedly either repair or replace the damaged item at their expense.  It is essentially an insurance policy for your furniture.

It is also much more expensive than the old Stainsafe warranty.  The cost of Stainsafe was relatively low and was based on the size of the furniture.  The EPP cost, on the other hand, is a percentage of the purchase price of the furniture, and some items could cost several times more to insure under the EPP than they would have to treat with Stainsafe.

This is not surprising.  Since the furniture is no longer being given an anti-stain treatment, stains are more likely, which means it is more likely that the insurer will have to replace it.    Also, it appears that Stainsafe tried to improve its bottom line by going out of its way to avoid paying claims; if the company administering the EPP operates in a more consumer-friendly way, then it must pay out claims more often.  In short, more claims are being paid out under the new warranty, so the fees must be higher to cover the cost of the claims.

This change is not necessarily good or bad.  It’s just different, and I felt it was noteworthy enough to post about.  If you’ve had any experience with getting Jordan’s to honor a Stainsafe warranty they sold you now that Stainsafe is bankrupt, or with getting furniture repaired or replaced under the new EPP warranty, I’d love to hear about it, so please post a comment or email me.

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 Pulaski Build-A-Bear loft bed, sold by Jordan’s Furniture and other furniture retailers, has a dangerous safety defect with the brackets with which the ladder is attached to the bed.  Jordan’s Furniture failed to adequately address this defect when notified about it.  The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is currently investigating.  I am posting this article to warn the owners and potential owners of this bed about this safety defect.

Details

A year or so ago, my wife and I bought a Pulaski Build-A-Bear loft bed from Jordan’s Furniture in Natick, MA.  The bed was delivered to us in February 2008.

Early in 2009, I noticed that one of the two metal brackets from which the ladder hangs on the bed was broken.  The break was not obvious, because the bracket is sheathed in plastic to minimize scratches to the bed’s finish.  Although the plastic sheathing was holding the broken part of the bracket in place, the bracket was not actually supporting any weight.

This is a serious safety issue.  A ladder with a broken bracket could collapse at any time, risking serious injury to the person on the ladder and anyone under or near it.  Weight-bearing components need to be designed with a large enough safety margin to ensure that critical components won’t break in normal use.

I contacted Jordan’s Furniture and made three requests:

1. Repair or replace our broken ladder immediately.
2. Take steps to ensure that what happened to our ladder doesn’t happen to anyone else.
3. Convince me that the issue has been adequately addressed, or I will have no choice but to file a complaint with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

Jordan’s replaced our broken ladder very quickly indeed — they sent out a crew with a new ladder on their very next delivery day.

However, they did nothing at all to address the larger issue, i.e., that if this could happen to us, then it could happen to anyone else who has bought this particular bed, and something needs to be done about it.

A representative of Jordan’s informed me that their Director of Quality Control examined our broken ladder and discussed it with the manufacturer.  Also, they claimed to have checked their customer service database and found no other reports of similar incidents from other customers.  Finally, they sent me a copy of an independent laboratory certification purporting to show that the bed was safe.

I have no way of knowing whether they were telling the truth when they claimed that no one else had reported similar issues.  However, even taking this claim at face value, it is mostly irrelevant for a number of reasons:

1. The beds haven’t been on the market for very long, so it is possible that the failure of our ladder presages many failures to come, and some of them will probably cause injuries.
2. As noted above, it is not obvious when one of the brackets has broken, because the broken piece remains held in place by the plastic sheathing.  We were lucky to notice the problem, and it’s likely that there are other broken brackets whose owners haven’t noticed.
3. Even a single failure suggests a design failure which must be investigated to ensure the safety of other purchasers of this product.

Concerning the laboratory certification, while it confirmed that the bed conforms to three standards for bunk bed safety, ASTM F 1427-06, CFR 1213, and CRF 1513, none of these standards addresses requirements for bunk bed ladders; they deal mostly with gaps in the guard rails and between the mattress and the bed frame.  Therefore, the certification is irrelevant to the question of whether the ladder brackets are safe.

I pointed all of this out to them, and that’s when they stopped responding to my emails.  Therefore, I filed a complaint with the CPSC as I had told Jordan’s I would if they failed to adequately address the issue.

A couple of weeks after I filed my complaint, a CPSC product safety investigator called to speak with me about it.  He made an appointment to come to my house to see the bed in person, although I could no longer show him the broken ladder, since Jordan’s had taken it away when they brought the replacement.  That appointment was today, and the investigator left my house a few hours ago.

The CPSC does not have the resources to investigate every complaint they receive.  It seems clear from the fact that the CPSC is investigating my complaint at all, let alone that they responded so quickly, that they consider it significant.

Consumers should consider this issue carefully before purchasing the Pulaski Build-A-Bear loft bed.

If you already own one of these beds, then I urge you to monitor the condition of the ladder brackets carefully and to demand repair or replacement from the retailer immediately if one of them breaks.  You may also wish to contact the retailer and ask what is being done to address this issue.  Depending on how much it concerns you, you may even wish to ask the retailer to take back the bed and refund your money if they cannot prove that the ladder is safe.

I will post any new information I receive about this issue.

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?