FanShot

Beware Hockeymonkey.com

9

I hope you guys don't mind me posting this, but I have been really irritated with my recent dealings with the site hockeymonkey.com. If you feel this inappropriate, feel free to remove it, I just wanted to share my pain with others as a warning. I've been looking into getting in to playing ice hockey. I've only done inline over the course of my life, and my brother-in-law is pushing me to learn to play ice hockey. Well, I'm ok with that. I just needed to get the equipment necessary to get on the ice (and learn how to skate and such). So he recommended that I buy equipment from a site called hockeymonkey.com, and they also have a store in Woodbridge, NJ. For the holidays this year, I asked for gift certs to HM, and received $200. My BIL and I planned to head down to the store Tuesday, December 27 to use our respective gifts and purchase equipment. Well, for whatever stupid reason, you can't use gift cards purchased online at the stores (it would have been nice to make sure everything fit before purchasing). Ok, so no big deal, I'll just order what I needed online. I place my order for a pair of inline skates (I needed new ones anyway), a pair of shoulderpads on clearance, and a pair of ice hockey pants on clearance. I placed the order on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 27, with ground shipping. Hooray! Soon I'll have my new equipment, right? Nope. So I keep checking the status of my order, since it wasn't updating. I'm a patient man, and with the holidays, things can get hectic, so I give them the benefit of the doubt. This Tuesday, I call up to find out what's going on with my order. Customer service has no clue and says they'll look into and get back to me in a few hours. More than a few hours later, I haven't heard anything, so I call again. They still have no clue (because essentially they haven't looked into it yet), but this girl says she'll try to figure it out and call me back. I get a call about an hour later, and it turns out that one of the items I ordered was out of stock (the pants on clearance). Now I can understand that this could happen, especially with clearance items. But for starters, why couldn't they alert me sometime in the week leading up to this that there was an issue? Why did I have to call them more than once before I was given an answer? I was going to forgive and forget on this one since everything was sorted out on Tuesday. Except of course I check the status on Thursday morning, and still nothing has shipped! Now I was absolutely furious (still am) about the way that my order was handled. Not only that, but now I've had to turn into the jerk customer, which is something I absolutely hate. I told them flat out that either they send my order next day air now so I could have my equipment for this weekend, or else they can forget keeping me as a customer. To ice the cake, they were @kind enough@ to ship out my order 2nd day air...on a Thursday. They may as well have done absolutely nothing, because this is the virtual equivalent of not caring about the customer. My complaints have essentially fallen on deaf ears over there at hockeymonkey. I even complained on their FB page, and that complaint was eventually deleted and they blocked me from posting again, just because I wanted to warn others that they aren't so peachy keen. In my opinion, a company should learn from their errors and try to fix them. After all, in the end, a business cannot survive without winning and keeping new customers. They don't understand this concept, so they've lost me as a customer. The next time I need to make a purchase, I will look elsewhere, because I have no faith in them. On a side note, I go to open skates for inline hockey in Morristown every Friday night, 10PM to midnight. It's only $10 and pretty relaxed for the most part. Just throwing that out there because when there is only 1 or 2 subs, well, I'm too old and too out of shape still to stay out on the rink for 10 minutes at a time, so the more the merrier!