Product Reviews: Purchase Follow-Ups

I don’t know if it’s just me or not, but I tend to put a lot of thought into how and where I spend my money.  I pre­fer qual­ity over quan­tity and noth­ing frus­trates me quite as much as buy­ing a prod­uct that fails to deliver the degree of qual­ity I expect – except maybe a com­pany that fails to deliver the level of ser­vice I expect.

On the other hand, I get an inor­di­nate amount of sat­is­fac­tion from expe­ri­ences in which I feel I got an excel­lent return on my money.  I’m not talk­ing about just those times where I find a great bar­gain though I do love a good 75% off sale as much as the next per­son.  I get a huge amount of sat­is­fac­tion from a prod­uct that deliv­ers, or bet­ter yet exceeds, my expec­ta­tions.  Or instances in which I receive excel­lent cus­tomer service.

I’ve pur­chased quite a few prod­ucts for myself, my home, and my kids over the past few months.  I thought I’d take some time today to share some follow-up infor­ma­tion about my expe­ri­ences with the prod­ucts I bought and the com­pa­nies I bought them from.

Amana French-Door Bottom-Freezer Refrig­er­a­tor
I pur­chased this refrig­er­a­tor on the same day I started this blog.  It was the first new ‘fridge I’ve ever owned.  The entire fam­ily loves it and we haven’t had a sin­gle regret about our choice of prod­ucts, style, brand, or ven­dor.  The auto­matic ice maker, a mild bone of con­tention for The Hus­band, works great and I’m really glad I pushed for it.

Men’s Khakis from Aero­postale
The pants are nice enough. The Son likes them and they look pretty good on him. But I wouldn’t buy them again and I won’t buy any more. Why?  Because the waist­band but­ton came off in the first wash.

I know how to sew on but­tons and I had all the nec­es­sary tools and mate­ri­als on hand to get the job done — but I was busy and I hate sewing on but­tons.  I put the pants in a “to do” pile, stuck the but­ton in my shorts pocket, and for­got about them.  It wasn’t until last month that I finally got around to sewing the but­ton on so it wasn’t until last month that The Son finally got to start wear­ing the pants.

Then, the sec­ond time I washed the pants, another but­ton fell off.  This time it was the right rear pocket but­ton.  That but­ton is still sit­ting on my kitchen counter.  It will not be sewn on as I have nei­ther the time nor the incli­na­tion to replace the sec­ond of three but­tons to fall off this pair of pants.

The Daugh­ter, who her­self has owned sev­eral pair of Aero­postale khakis, informed me that the but­tons always fall off their pants.  She just uses a safety pin instead.

I say “bull pucky”.  I say, “no thanks, Aero­postale”.  If I wanted build-your-own pants, I’d do just that — go back to mak­ing my children’s cloth­ing by hand.  When I buy a pair of pants, I expect the but­tons, clasps, and other fas­ten­ers to stay on for the life of the gar­ment — or at least pretty darned long.  It’s the prin­ci­ple of the thing.

So, Aero­postale is on my “nope, won’t bother” list.  Improve the qual­ity and I’ll come back but until then there are too many other sources of men’s khakis that don’t require me to keep a sewing nee­dle and bob­bin of thread at the ready.

Hanes Com­fort Waist­band Clas­sic Briefs
If you fol­lowed along on my ago­niz­ing and expen­sive Great Under­wear Search of ‘08you’ll remem­ber that I ended up hit­ting righty tighty whitey pay­dirt with Target’s men’s Hanes Com­fort Waist­band clas­sic briefs.  Despite the fact that The Son declared these the best fit, these pur­chases have not been unequiv­o­cally happy ones.  In fact, I have two com­plaints about this product/brand.

The first is just a minor com­plaint — they don’t come in white.  Col­ors are great; col­ors are fun; The Son is fine with col­ored briefs.  But white would be good too.

My sec­ond com­plaint is much more seri­ous and, under nor­mal cir­cum­stances would keep me from buy­ing this prod­uct alto­gether.  They aren’t 100% cot­ton.  Well, let me clar­ify — only some of the briefs are 100% cot­ton, the solid col­ors.  The heathered col­ors are a cotton/poly blend.  And all of the pack­ages con­tain at least some heathered colors.

I take my pref­er­ence for 100% nat­ural fibers pretty darned seri­ously.  The Daugh­ter, in these recent years as an inde­pen­dently minded teenager choos­ing her own cloth­ing, has cho­sen to pur­chase cer­tain gar­ments that con­tain syn­thetic fibers.  The Son and I, how­ever, are strictly natural-fiber wearers.  And when it comes to underwear, cotton is a must — even for The Daugh­ter.  Cot­ton breathes; nylon and poly­ester don’t.  Under­wear, in order to main­tain proper tem­per­a­tures and opti­mal health of the areas cov­ered, should be a breath­able fab­ric.  There­fore, every­one in our fam­ily wears cot­ton under­wear.  But now The Son owns and wears under­wear con­structed of blended fab­ric.  That is a com­pro­mise I never imag­ined myself mak­ing — and it hurts.

Cot­ton­field organic cot­ton briefs
These briefs are almost iden­ti­cal in cut, size, and style to the Hanes Com­fort Band briefs dis­cussed above.  There exist, however, huge dif­fer­ences between them.  The first would be price — I pay $9.49 for a pack­age of 5 Hanes briefs at Tar­get.  The Cot­ton­field organic cot­ton briefs run $17.95 — a pair!  The sec­ond would be the fab­ric.  As stated above, many of the Hanes briefs aren’t even 100% cot­ton much less 100% organic cot­ton.  For some peo­ple, that wouldn’t be an issue at all.  For me, it’s a huge issue.

In all hon­esty, if The Son were done grow­ing and I knew he’d wear these briefs for as long as they’d last, I’d buy a cou­ple pair at a time (to help spread out the expense) until we’d built up a full wardrobe of them.  But at 13, there’s no way he’s going to stay in this size for very long — even if he retains his skinny form.  So for now, we’ll mix the one pair of organic cot­ton briefs in with the cotton-blend Hanes briefs and I’ll just have to learn to live with it.

Com­pany Store Cot­ton Flan­nel Sheets
Of all the pur­chases I’ve made over the past, well I don’t know how long, this is one of the most painful and dis­ap­point­ing.  It’s not just the expense involved — espe­cially since I’m still within my 90 day return win­dow.  It’s the degree to which I feel this prod­uct let me down.

As I wrote, I bought flan­nel sheets from The Com­pany Store a cou­ple of years ago that were noth­ing short of beau­ti­ful.  Even now, after sev­eral sea­sons of use, they are thick, soft, and as smooth as a baby’s bot­tom.  They are luxurious.

The new cot­ton flan­nel sheets don’t even come close to match­ing the qual­ity of the older sheets.  These new sheets pilled exten­sively.  In all fair­ness, they’re still pretty soft because the “pills” aren’t as hard or defined as the pills on our old cheap flan­nel sheets.  Still, they pilled.  And that’s just not what I expected.  The old flan­nel sheet from The Com­pany Store don’t have a sin­gle pill among them — three fit­ted sheets and any num­ber of pil­low cases.  Every sin­gle one of the new flan­nel sheets and pil­low cases is cov­ered with pilling.

I called The Com­pany Store’s cus­tomer ser­vice phone num­ber this morn­ing.  The agent tried to help but there wasn’t much she could offer.  My orig­i­nal sheet pur­chase was no longer in the com­puter sys­tem so we couldn’t con­firm exactly what those sheets had been called.  We did clar­ify that the orig­i­nal sheets are labeled as hav­ing been made in Por­tu­gal pre­sum­ably of Por­tuguese cot­ton flan­nel while the new sheets were made in Czech Repub­lic of Ger­man fab­ric.  We also clar­i­fied that their heavier-weight cot­ton flan­nel sheet cur­rently offered in the cat­a­log are sup­plied by the same com­pany — made in Czech Repub­lic of Ger­man fab­ric.  Thus, it’s a pretty good bet that upgrad­ing to the 6oz flan­nel won’t solve the prob­lem of pilling.  It seems to sim­ply be a case of dif­fer­ent sup­pli­ers between the two purchases.

I’m strug­gling with what to do at this point.  The new sheets are usable albeit dis­ap­point­ing in rela­tion to what I expected and to my orig­i­nal flan­nel sheet pur­chase from the same com­pany.  I can send them back for a refund (I’ll have to eat the orig­i­nal ship­ping charges and I’ll prob­a­bly have to pay return ship­ping though.)  If I send them back, I’ll have to keep look­ing for a dif­fer­ent source of flan­nel bed­ding because we can’t make it through next win­ter hav­ing only one sheet set for each bed.  I dread the thought of another Great Under­wear Search — expend­ing both time and money try­ing out prod­ucts until I find some­thing I like.  Flan­nel bed­ding is heavy and I could rack up some seri­ous ship­ping charges in no time at all.

What­ever I decide, I need to do it soon.  I pur­chased the first batch of sheets (for the kids’ beds) on Jan­u­ary 11.  I have a lit­tle longer on the sheets for our bed — I pur­chased those on Valentine’s Day.  But if I send some back I’ll want to send them all back so I have to decide what to do this week.

edit:  I’m edit­ing this post to add a photo of the sheets in ques­tion.  On the left are the new flan­nel sheets (The Com­pany Store, 5oz flan­nel).  On the right are the old flan­nel sheets (The Com­pany Store, spe­cific prod­uct name unknown).  Also, I’ve cor­rected the coun­tries in which the two dif­fer­ent sets of flan­nel sheets were man­u­fac­tur­ered (sorry, for­got to fact-check before publishing).

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