How to Get a Free Couch
West Elm is offering “a full refund or replacement of orders placed in the U.S. and Canada after July 2014.”
A few days ago, I wrote a piece for the Awl about West Elm’s “Peggy” sofa—a couch that hundreds of people have bought over the three years of its existence on the market. I knew, when I wrote the piece, that quite a few former Peggy owners were disgruntled with the sofa’s poor quality, but in the days after the article was published, I heard from possibly hundreds of readers who had bought the same couch and had almost identical experiences. People sounded off in the comments about their own bittersweet Peggy memories, and sent me beautifully composed pictures on Twitter of their tragic button collections.
Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much?
@HezelAnna @morninggloria I am also a survivor and I really, REALLY agree
Former West Elm employees speculated about the company’s poor manufacturing standards, and a few professional furniture craftsmen and craftswomen offered advice about buying antique pieces and having them refurbished.
One person kindly calculated how many Gold Bears one could eat for $1200 a year. Someone wrote to me to say that I should stop referring to the Peggy as a couch because it is technically a sofa — a piece of semantic information that I can’t wait to pull out some day when I want to make someone feel inferior.
Three days after my article came out, I noticed that all traces of the Peggy (including the Peggy chair and the Peggy sectional) had disappeared from West Elm’s website. BuzzFeed received conflicting stories from stores across the country why the couch had gone missing.
I asked a West Elm representative about it. She replied:
Feedback, such as yours, is the one true source of information necessary to allow us to address areas where we are not meeting our goals.
I want to assure you that this information is taken very seriously. Every inquiry received is reviewed and submitted to our executive team and buyers in the specific area. It’s important to know that not all situations are like yours and we handle each of them case by case. We take necessary measures, internally, as we see fit. In this case Ms. Hezel, we deemed it was best to remove the Peggy sofa from our website.
This afternoon, though, I heard from another West Elm PR representative with some news. West Elm is now offering owners of defective Peggys “a full refund or replacement of orders placed in the U.S. and Canada after July 2014.”
Go forth and get your money back.
(Customers should contact the special support number (888) 922–7870 or email [email protected].)