Good to the Last Drop…and a Cautionary Tale

What kind of coffee do you drink? Having been born and raised in the Seattle area, of course you get inundated with all kinds of different kinds of coffee – the two biggest Coffee Giants are of course Starbucks and Seattle’s Best Coffee (aka SBC). Daily runs to Starbucks to get my favorites and try new variations were a common thread amongst myself and my friends. When I moved to Pennsylvania, I went through withdrawals because they didn’t have any Starbucks here at all. Over the last 5 years or so, they’ve finally opened some Starbucks locations here, but the first ones were quite a drive from where I lived, so it never became ‘habit forming’ again for me…which is probably a good thing, especially after deciding to stay home with our Miracle Baby and do that Stay At Home Mom thing! 😉 Every so often I still indulge, especially since they built a new Target fairly close to me, and have a Starbucks there. But now it’s a special treat for me, rather than a regular gig.

Instead, my hubby and I use a coffee press to make our daily coffee – we were introduced to those when we were visiting a colleague of his in San Francisco years ago, saw them at Starbucks and each bought one to bring back with us. They made regular boring coffee taste rich and satisfying! 😉 I hadn’t paid too much attention to the kinds of coffee available in the grocery store, because I had all types of delicious coffee available to me in Seattle. But here in ‘Small Town America’, the choices were slim. I bought the brand ‘Chock full o’Nuts’ once, because my hubby said that’s the coffee his parents drank. I only made one pot of that. Couldn’t stand it. The majority of friends out here seem to prefer Folgers, so I drank that, but still missed my Starbucks, so I’d order beans online every so often as a special treat.

Then of course I got suckered into the whole Gevalia thing – their coffee is great, their cost is not. 😉 We drink lots of coffee, but certainly not enough to warrant paying for that membership, plus we weren’t finishing the coffee before the next shipment came so we were starting to collect quite the stockpile of coffee. So we went back to Folgers. Then Maxwell House went on sale, and I decided we might as well try that. I was surprised at how good it was – I mean, I had seen the ‘Good to the Last Drop’ commercials (and some of them were very creative!) but always assumed that ‘old people’ drank Maxwell House. Of course, that mindset should also apply to Folgers, but I hadn’t really thought of it that way. So Maxwell House ended up being our coffee choice for home brewing, though I would still buy Folgers when it was on sale. 😉

Then earlier this month I stumbled across ‘Seattle Coffee Direct’, they were offering a sample pack of 2 12 oz. bags of their gourmet coffee, plus you would get 2 stainless steel travel mugs, 1 set of Ceramic Mugs and 2 Coffee Roasts. They touted their offer as 5 for $5 each:

My inner voice told me that it was silly to spend $25 on 1-1/2 pounds of gourmet coffee – but I thought maybe it would be a really delicious coffee, and I could get the travel mugs with ‘Seattle’ on them to remind me of home. The portion of the ‘fine print’ I paid the most attention to is in red:

Shipping Info

So my thinking was, I’ll splurge on the $25.00 to try out this new coffee, get some cool travel mugs that have ‘Seattle’ imprinted on them, and see how it goes. In the notification that I got, they give you a 14 day ‘trial’ before they send out the new shipments, which gives you time to try the coffee and determine if you like it in order to continue your membership. That is not the case.

I ordered on January 10th. My account was billed the $25.00 on the 12th. I actually received my package on January 13th (shockingly fast). The package included the coffee mugs and the 2 bags of coffee (one of which was a substitute of their nut version vs. my selection of their chocolate version) and I was disappointed to see that the travel mugs were blank – no ‘Seattle’ on them anywhere, and they looked suspiciously like the ones I had seen at the Dollar Store that I bypassed because they were flimsy and cheap. I told my husband I would definitely be canceling my ‘membership’, because I finally noticed (when I dug a little deeper) that it wasn’t a monthly membership as I had assumed based on my prior Gevalia membership, but a bi-monthly membership…meaning they’ll be shipping coffee to me every 2 weeks. I was shocked when just 4 days later I received another package – 2 bags of coffee (still not my original selection). I hadn’t even opened the initial coffee yet to try it out. I was not happy.

I was even less happy when I noticed that there were now two additional charges on my account – one for the shipment I received 4 days after the initial order, and a second charge pending for 4 days after that. That’s ‘bi-monthly’? Every 4 days? I immediately called the ‘800’ number. I spoke with a very nice guy in Customer Service who seemed just as surprised as I was by the frequency of the scheduled shipments. He promised to issue a credit immediately for the charge that was still pending, that I should see the credit in 3-4 days. He canceled that shipment, and canceled my membership. Since I hadn’t yet opened my second package, he told me to write ‘Return to Sender’ on the envelope and drop it back in the mail. Not only did I do that, but I re-boxed the initial order (with the unopened coffee and cheap coffee cups) and shipped that back too, since they do have a ‘refund’ policy:

Refund Policy