A furious family claim they have been forced to perch on garden furniture for weeks on end when DFS 'lost' their sofa - before sending them a 'smelly' loan couch. Jessica Glanfield ordered the £3,000 sofa from the furniture company in December and was given a March delivery date but says the suite never arrived.
After an alleged second failed delivery promise the following week the 37-year-old contacted the retailer in a desperate bid to track down her sofa. It was only after marching into the Bristol branch of the store, having sat on garden furniture for a month, that the store manager revealed part of her order had reportedly been lost in transit.
DFS then offered to send the family a 'loan sofa' for the extra ten-week wait while they reordered the missing sofa - but the dog trainer says the 'disgusting' couch that arrived 'stinks of a dirty van'. Jessica, from Stroud, Gloucestershire, said: "I stayed at home for the delivery.
"I earn about £300-400 a day and had to give that income up but that's fine, it's what you'd expect, but then it never turned up. We rang and they promised us another delivery date about a week later. I rang before then and they assured me it was coming.
"I took another day off work and the same thing happened, it didn't turn up again. So we've now lost a minimum of £600 in income waiting for a sofa that never came. We also sold our old sofa a few days before the new sofa was supposed to arrive so we've had to sit on garden furniture since then.
"My other half has been recovering from a major operation and the surgeon said he needed to sit in a certain position and he just couldn't sit comfortably. We couldn't really sit in the living room or use the front room at all, we just went straight up to bed. We told DFS about this and they didn't care.
"We drove about an hour to our local store and met the manager who looked into our case and said the sofa had been lost. They now have to reorder our sofa which is going to take another ten weeks and I don't even know if it'll come then, I just don't trust them at all."
The failed deliveries meant that Jessica, her fiancé and their teenage son were forced to drag garden furniture into their living room after selling their old sofa days before it was meant to arrive. After a month of being unable to enjoy their living room and the company admitting that the back of their new sofa had been lost, they were relieved to be offered a temporary loan sofa.
But when the grey leather two-seater arrived at the end of April, the family-of-three were furious not only that they couldn't all fit on the sofa but that it 'stunk' as well. The family are now stuck with the used loan couch for at least ten weeks while they wait for DFS to reorder and deliver their sofa.
Jessica said: "They've sent us this loan sofa which we were really pleased to have but it turned up and it's this disgusting, dirty, sofa that stinks that they obviously pass around people. I don't know what's worse out of the garden furniture and this shoddy loan sofa.
"There's three people that live here and we can't sit together because they've sent a two-seater sofa and it's tiny, so one of us has to sit on the floor. It's broken in the middle so my other half can't sit on it and the mechanisms don't work on it either.
"It just couldn't be more insulting really. I thought they would have the decency to send us a reasonable sofa. It's disgusting, you sit on it and it stinks like a dirty van. Now we've got to have that for at least ten weeks."
The mum says she has sent countless online messages to DFS and spent 'hours' on the phone to customer services in her attempts to get answers from the company on the status of her order. She claims that a branch manager provided her with print-outs of her communication with customer services and confirmed that the sofa had been lost, despite the call handlers never mentioning this.
Jessica claims the notes also showed that call handlers marked the issue as 'dealt with' and said 'no further action required' despite the sofa never having arrived. Jessica said: "Every time I tagged them on Twitter publicly they would always reply with messages to placate us telling you to contact them directly and then when you do they don't reply for weeks.
"The call centres were useless - there's no way you can speak to the warehouse or managers and they just lied to us and kept saying it was coming. You don't bother calling because you can't get anything from them.
"Nobody ever bothered to tell us they'd lost the sofa - they've lost the back of the sofa so goodness knows how they've managed to lose part of the sofa and not the other part. It feels like a story that's never going to end. I've never felt so frustrated in my whole life."
Furious Jessica now vows never to shop at DFS again and hopes to warn other customers about her experience with the furniture giant. Jessica said: "We still don't have the sofa and when we eventually do get the sofa, we don't even know if we want it anymore.
"I can't believe a company can treat its customers so appallingly. I would never ever touch them ever again. When we were in the store I made a point of raising my voice to discourage other customers from buying from them.
"I feel like going down to the store with placards to warn people but I have better things to do with my life." The couple have become so exasperated by their dire situation that they are now considering pushing for a full refund and ordering a sofa from elsewhere.
A DFS spokesperson said: "At DFS, we’re committed to providing our customers with high quality products and excellent service. Unfortunately, [the customers'] experience fell short of the high standards that we set for ourselves. While the vast majority of our customers' products are delivered on time, in rare instances, human errors can occur which cause a delay.
"In this instance, part of [the customers'] order was misplaced during transportation and unfortunately unable to be located. We reordered the product for the customer and loan furniture was arranged for their use in the meantime.
"We sincerely apologise that the loan furniture provided was not fit for purpose and did not meet the customers’ needs or expectations. We have escalated this to our internal team to ensure that quality control is being adhered to at all times.
"We are very sorry for their experience and we’ve extended our sincere apologies to the customers. We have agreed to provide them with a full refund and have arranged collection of the loan furniture. We hope we have resolved the issue to their satisfaction."
