First, I have to say that I was a huge fan of Midwest Suppplies before this experience, and your experiences may not have been the same at all. Also, I am sure that everyone has an issue with a supplier at one point or another. That being said, the following is an account of a recent order placed with Midwest Supplies for over $700. It's gonna be a long post but I want to make sure that no one else has the issues I did, and may choose to do their business elsewhere.
Let's start with the email I wrote to customer service, which should sum up the initial problems with my order:
Hello,
I am writing with regard to a recent order I made and with several past orders which have experienced the same difficulty.
With Order #1602515 I ordered a substantial amount of product. (I am sure I'm not your largest customer, but nevertheless...). The order was the result of gift cards I was given. I specifically requested gift cards for Midwest Supplies because I knew that I would be able to find just about everything I needed on your site and despite past experiences with the delivery of those orders, I did not want to shop in several different places. This is the reason I prefer Midwest Supplies over other sites.
Unfortunately my experience with the actual delivery of the products I requested was the same with this order as it has been with other orders. The status on the website remained as "processing" for the entire week. (I believe I ordered on a Sunday and eventually called customer service on Friday.) When I phoned customer service on the following Friday and asked about the status I was greeted courteously and professionally. Unfortunately I did not get the service representatives name. She explained that the entire order had been delayed due to 3 of the items I had ordered being out of stock. I asked her to please send the rest of the items and to ship the out of stock items in a separate shipment. She agreed to do this and even suggested that they wait until Monday since I had ordered some liquid yeast and she didn't want it to spoil. I appreciated the thoughtfulness and thanked her.
What I don't understand is why there was no notice of the items being out of stock at the time of order? I would understand if items were out of stock but there should certainly be some notice during the shopping process online. One would think that your inventory database is linked to the web page itself and if it isn't, why not? If the items were out of stock, there should really be an option to have the in stock items shipped separately or not, as decided by the consumer. I am happy to wait for products that are out of stock, but I don't want my entire shipment held up because of them. The biggest issue was that I had planned to brew on a specific date and I was sure that I would have my yeast in time to do so. Now, I don't think that will happen, but it could have been avoided with a phone call, either by Midwest to myself or vice versa. Of course, I didn't know there was a problem.
I had a similar experience with Order #1518798 where it was a week or more until I called and found out that the shipping was backed up. Again, if I had been notified, I wouldn't have had any issue. I would have been satisfied with that explanation.
On Order #1572056, I ordered 2 of the same product and I only received 1. This was clearly a simple mistake and when I called it was promptly corrected. Again, the customer service staff was friendly and apologetic. I have no issues with that. However, the replacement (or rather, misplaced) product took almost as long as or longer than the original product to arrive. Typically if this has happened to me with other companies, they have shipped out the misplaced or replacement product immediately so as to limit the amount of time that I was deprived of its use.
I really do enjoy shopping with Midwest Supplies, I would like to think that I will be able to in the future. I do have reservations however. I find it a hassle to have to continuously call to find out what happened to and or fix my order. It's not just the time wasted on the phone that bothers me but the time I don't get to spend doing what I love to do; brew! I hope you will take this into consideration and it would be most appreciated if I could hear back from a manager about what can be done to correct the problem in the future. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Regards,
Jonathan Groner
Mood:
Their response intitially:
Hi Jonathan,
I am very sorry about the hassles you've had with us in the past, and we hope to keep you on board with us in the future. The past couple months here have been hectic since we moved our warehouse to a new location and are working out the bugs that come along with such a large change. As a result, some things regretfully don't get handled as well as we'd like, such as our backorder system. We agree that the current setup is not a good one, which is why we are working on reforming it so that these kinds of things don't happen again. I understand your frustration, and I apologize again for your unsatisfactory experiences. I have forwarded your email along to my manager, and he will respond to you as well, hopefully with more detail than I am able to provide. Please let me know if I can be of any further service to you.
Cheers,
Travis
Mood:
The response from the manager:
Jonathan-
I am very sorry for your troubles, and hope that we are past the issues that created them. We are glad to have you as a customer and appreciate the fact that you took the time to email us with your concerns.
We have had many changes around Midwest and the changes have lead to difficulties in many of our processes. As Travis mentioned we are working hard to get back to a service level that our customers have come to expect.
Here are a couple of things we have done to get there:
1.Synced our Out of Stock list with the website. Here is a snipped section of the sight for one of our problematic products that are on backorder from the supplier. (You can see the updated availability section. That also shows up on the shopping cart page.)
2.Customer Communication. We have defined a plan that will allow us to contact customers as soon as there is some sort of delay with their order. This will take a little time, but we hope to be able to contact customers whenever their order isnt shipping within 24 hours.
Once again, I am very sorry for the issues. We are not happy that they happened at all, but we are working to make the experience better for you and the rest of our customers. We realize the importance of keeping a scheduled brewday, because an empty beer fridge is worse than an empty food fridge.
In hopes that your next experience goes smoothly, I would like to offer you a $20 gift code to cover your shipping on another order. I am confident that your next order will be a much smoother one.
Happy brewing!
Cheers,
Todd Jackson
Midwest Supplies
Mood:
Then there was a bit of a back and forth becuase he never actually sent the $20 card but it was eventually worked out.
Later that week my order shipped. The backordered items showed that they shipped as well. I thought "Sweet, now I will be getting everything I ordered in one shipment." Then I saw the weight of the packages from UPS. There was no way all the stuff I ordered only weighed 60 lbs considering I ordered a 50 Lb sack of Briess 2-Row.
Mood:
Nevertheless I remained optimistic. The order arrived and the backordered items were not there. No big deal there since they told me about it eventually. Then I noticed my liquid yeast sitting in two envelopes which were actually HOT to the touch.
Mood:
You see I had paid almost $10 extra for a nice styrofoam container to have the yeast shipped in and instead it arrived in envelopes with just a few extra ice packs which obvviously didnt help.
I immediately placed them in the fridge and wrote back to Todd:
Mr. Jackson,
I'm not sure if I should be contacting you about this or if I should start the process over. As I stated before I had some concerns with shipping which I believe you are all trying to get under control. I received my partial shipment today (minus the back ordered items) and I noticed that the insulated box for liquid yeast that, I had paid $7.00 for (I believe that was the price) was not there. It too was apparently back ordered. But this was not even explained to me during my call to customer service the first time. I see they at least put the yeast in an insulated envelope and put in extra ice packs but nevertheless the yeast was extremely warm to the touch when it arrived. This may have happened with the insulated box anyway but I am concerned about its viability. I am also concerned that for the second time something was done (this time, in my opinion, an inferior substitution) to my order without any notice. If I knew the box was not available I would have asked them not to ship the yeast. I intend to make a starter with one package in the next day or so. If I find the yeast to not be viable I would like to receive a refund for both packs and the box that was not received.
A smaller concern is that I have no idea when my second shipment is being sent because on my account page it says everything was shipped. Can I expect shipping confirmation for the back ordered products?
I'm sorry to keep contacting you about this order. I just want to be sure I at the very least got what I paid for. Thanks again for your time.
Regards,
Jonathan Groner
Mood: Still
Then I noticed my bag of grain.... RAHR?! Really?! I mean I don't care one way or the other about which malting company I use but the flippin' sticker on the bag from midwest says Briess 2-Row! They put a Briess sticker on a bag that says RAHR in HUGE letters!
So then I wrote:
Also, forgot to mention that while it doesn't particularly concern me. I ordered 50 lbs. of American 2-Row which was described as being from Briess. The bag I got was from Rahr. Again, not an issue to me, but maybe to others...
Mood: Really
The response from Todd:
I am sorry for my delayed response. I was in Philadelphia as a Midwest Supplies representative at the National Homebrewer's conference.
As you mentioned, we are working to get our shipping and inventory under control. With that, we are working to get our communication under control as well. As you can imagine, the increase of issues like yours has lead to many contacts from many customers. In an effort to get the primary issues resolved, we decided that our communication would have to be reactive instead of proactive. Now that we are seeing some resolution to the fulfillment side of things, we are freeing up some of our Customer Service team who was helping out in the warehouse. That will give us the resources to get back into proactive communications.
I know that doesn't change your experience, and we all recognize that we still have many things that we need to fix. I will make sure that you are refunded for the difference in products. Please let me know if the yeast was any problem, as we will make sure you are able to brew a successful beer.
I will also address the Briess/Rahr 2 row issue with our grain room.
Sorry again for all of the issues.
Cheers,
Todd J
So after that I wrote a nice note back thanking Todd for his help:
Thanks Todd! Your continued efforts to fix the problem are what keep me coming back! I hope the NHC went well!
Regards,
Jon
After I recieved the response from Todd I decided to call that afternoonn and check on my backorder shipment. Customer service answered the phone promptly. And told me this:
Me: Hello I want to check on the backordered items on order number -----15.
MS: Oh well what were you missing?
Me: Ummm.... the products on backorder....????
MS: Oh ok, which ones?
Me: ALL OF THEM.
MS: Oh those won't be in for 2 more weeks unfortunately.
Me: They were supposed to have come in on the 28th.
MS: Well I am not showing that unfortunately.
Me: Can you please chck to be sure.
MS: Please hold.
<Phone disconnects.>
I call back:
Me: Hi I was just talking to someone about my order?
MS: Oh hi yeah, sorry about that, I checked and all of the items are in stock.
Me:.......... OK?
MS: So they should be shipping within the next day or so.
Me: How about you ship them,like, right now?
MS: Well unfortunatley I have no way of telling what the status of the order is.
Me: Well how can we find out.
MS: <pauses>...<typing>... Actually it looks like they are being picked right now from the floor...
Me: :smack:
So this is what I have dealt with up to this point.... I am seriously hopinng the rest of my order ships tomorrow or the next day because I would really like to be able to brew this weekend instead of waiting ANOTHER week for the stuff I paid for...
Whew! Anyone else had this experience?
If you continue to shop with Midwest I would just like to warn yoou of my issues. Also, I didnt even address the issue with their rewards points system. Basically, if you want that to work successfully, you had better phone your order in.
So now after a few cold beers...
Mood: