Tag gazelle.com poor standards

On my way home last night I stopped at the Wellness Center to officially cancel my membership.  The commute to the facility was long outside of season and borderline maddening during the last several weeks.  The building is nice, the gym area is nice, the locker rooms and showers are very nice but none of it made up for me losing 15 minutes of my allocated workout time each day dealing with traffic and parking.

I never really felt at home at NCH.  Despite there being a lot more people at the facility there was a lot less interaction between people than I have been accustomed to.  I also never liked that despite all of the equipment in there they did not have a simple pull up bar, the closest thing I could use was awkwardly hanging off the Smith machine bar or the low quality power tower rig they have.  I actually think I will be happier and more productive at Planet Fitness, which seems blasphemous to say.

So late last week I purchased a used iPad Air from Gazelle.com.  You may have heard their ads, they buy your used electronics and resell them.  I bought it as a pseudo Valentine’s Day present for Cindy although I would certainly use it as well.  It would be great for the personal trainer certification course she is working on.  It had a healthy 64 gigs of ram as well as ATT LTE service, freeing it from the shackles of wi-fi.  I was excited to spring it on Cindy.

So I tracked the package with FedEx.  It was arriving yesterday. I saw the package had a signature required parameter so I proactively hung a sign on the front door asking the driver to get the signature from our next door neighbor, which he did.  When I got home Cindy had already retrieved the box for me because I asked her to although she still had no idea what it was.

My first impression of the box was not good.  It looked like something that would have been shipped to me from a seller on Ebay.  It was a generic looking box with a sloppy looking tape job.  Once I opened the box I continued being unimpressed.  The packing material was a piece of spare foam folded in half and jammed inside.  There was no paperwork, no invoice, only a small branded Gazelle card.  The shitty packaging quickly became a minor issue as I saw the side profile of the iPad, it was in a V shape. What in the fck….

I pull the device out and verify it is destroyed. It literally looked like it had been stomped on.  I didn’t even bother removing it from the bubble wrap.  I looked again at the box and saw a small rip in the middle near an edge, probably the end result of whatever/whomever crushed the box.  I was PISSED.

When I told Cindy this mess was supposed to be a gift for her she appreciated my intentions and shared my disappointment.  Yes obviously the package had some sort of violent impact inflicted upon it but the lackluster packaging certainly did nothing to protect it.  At the very least, if they are going to send out electronics in sub-standard packaging a few FRAGILE labels applied to the box would make sense.

My frustration was amplified when I discovered Gazelle only answers the phone from 9AM to 6PM, meaning I was going to have to wait until today to vent.  I am afraid this is going to be a long drawn out process if Gazelle is going to seek remediation from FedEx before replacing the unit.  Obviously I will be lobbying for that to be not the case.