Jordan’s finally makes good on defective sofa

A couple months ago, I posted here about the defective American Leather sleeper sofa sold to us by Jordan’s Furniture.  In a nutshell, the sofa had a design defect — zippers were used to hold the seat-back cushions but weren’t strong enough to bear the weight — which caused our sofa to break; Jordan’s charged us $210 to replace it even though the sofa was under warranty; then the new sofa broke too.  I wrote to Jordan’s, told them that it was now clear that a design defect that had caused our first sofa to break; that they should stop selling American Leather sleeper sofas until the design was fixed; and that they should refund the $210 we had been charged to replace our first sofa with another one that broke the same way.  I also told them we didn’t want them to replace the sofa a second time, since one of the zippers on the third sofa would inevitably break just like the others, so there was no point.

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 the 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.