It’s been a while since I last posted. (you like the new look?) That’s cuz I was busy buying yarn and yarn related items. What can I say, I love buying yarn. (maybe even more than actually knitting. OK, let’s not go there) Whenever I find a great deal and I score the amount I want in a good color, I practically jump up and down. Once I get my package, I play with the skeins if they are single skeins, but most of the time, I just marvel at the yarn inside the mill packaged bags and keep them in there. Many yarns, I have yet to actually feel because they’re still in their original package. But because I have limited resources (although many might consider it infinite), I took to doing something good for my fellow knitters in Korea, while fulfilling my urge to buy discount yarn without spending my own dime. I found some good deals on yarns that are really expensive over there (Rowan Soft Lux and Jaeger Roma, all sold for over $10 in Korea) took orders on behalf of several knitters, and ordered the yarn, promising to send it to them if they’ll pay me for just the yarn and shipping cost. I had a lot of fun with it. It was really nice to just shove all these massive amounts of yarn in my shopping cart without feeling the guilt. And of course they went nuts. Even with the international shipping, each ball of yarn was going to set them back only $3.50 (a total bargain for them) I was getting orders for 50-60 balls of Soft Lux!

B-U-T…(you knew this was coming)…

this too-good-to-be-true deal of $1.49 Soft Lux was at Herrschner’s. If you’ve never heard of them, consider yourself warned. They have some unsavory business practices that I’ve found to range from really annoying to outright infuriating. You might think, ‘Then why the hell would you go back to them?’ For one, some of their deals just can’t be beat. Like this $1.49 Soft Lux for example. That’s INSANELY cheap. And they often throw in free shipping with just $35 purchase. You don’t see that too often these days. (Most online vendors have a $100 minimum to qualify for free shipping. Hells yeah I end up buying $100 or more) And lastly, I signed up for their Savings Club way back when I didn’t know any better (that’s $19.99 upfront and 10% savings on all orders for a full year. Plus a free shipping coupon that I can use whenever without a minimum purchase. I was sold!  By the time I had signed up I had already dropped a good $200 from Herrschner’s. By now, I think I got my money’s worth.) Anyway, this Soft Lux deal was a total bust because they kept the sale open without indicating that they were out of stock and when I finally decided to checkout, I got all these red flags saying “Not available” WTF? In the end, I had to call them and ask how many exactly did they have for me to buy. The woman on the line told me there were only 40 of Gigli color left (read: greenish khaki). So I told her to place an order for those 40 (which she begrudgingly did by manually punching it into her computer) and proceeded to tell everyone in Korea that their order would have to be adjusted because the store oversolf/ran out. At this point, I was kinda peeved because it wasn’t my fault that they ran out but I felt really bad having raised their hopes about a yarn they weren’t going to get.

It gets worse. When I get a package from Herrschner’s, it was really small. It couldn’t possibly hold 20 bags of Soft Lux much less 40. I open it and what do I see? No Soft Lux. Just a receipt with a “Backordered until 12/18″  WTF2?

This customer service rep (who I hear is THE go-to woman over there) specifically told me there were 40 and she was the one who manually checked the inventory levels and made the order on my behalf. I couldn’t understand what the Then I get this flimsy piece of mail the other day from Herrschner’s which basically said this – We don’t have it so we won’t send it. Sorry. At this point, I was PISSED. All that for nothing? Do you realize how many freakin hours I spent trying to coordinate this thing so that my knitting buddies over in Korea could get this? How many emails and PMs to check colors and exact number needed for certain projects and actual shipping costs through usps.com and trying to decipher the currency conversion. I almost had a fit.

However, the rational side of me (not when I’m yarn shopping though) kicked in and I decided not to grill the CSR for taking a bad order. She just did her job and her computer lied to her. It wasn’t exactly her fault. Who to blame but my poor self for believing Herrschner’s? I wrote each and every one of the Korean knitters and apologized for the way things turned out. Everyone was really civil about it but I had a feeling a few of them were peeved because they had told THEIR friends about what a great deal was to be had and their friends then went on to order the yarn. It was one giant ugly mess. I had to do damage control so I sent out a round of emails telling them about Smiley’s Jaeger Roma (that baby has been out there for $1.99 for almost a full year now. I KNOW they had these in stock.) Some took the deal, others didn’t (probably because they were so put off by the first fiasco). I actually absorbed the shipping cost in the US. $12.95. (and thus I just HAD to order some extra yarn for myself if I was going to pay that much for shipping) Racked up something like $350 and promptly got a letter from Smiley’s saying they would be sending the order in two separate boxes because it was so big. I kind of had to laugh at that. The last time something like that happened was when I first discovered Little Knits and went totally nuts (remember this was when my stash was still manageable)

In the end, everything worked out pretty well and I learned a valuable lesson: take Herrschner’s with a grain of salt and NEVER order anything on someone else’s behalf from them.