Sweeties, Pies and Ginger

Karen and I decided to use a company called The Gift Registry for our wedding gift list. The idea was that you could have gifts from a selection of shops on your list, rather than being stuck with the selection from a single shop. The idea was great, the execution was appalling.

To start with we had to go round all the shops and write down what items we wanted, giving the price, shop specific code and a short description. It would have been much easier to have a hand scanner and wander round one store zapping things.

However, we eventually settled on the contents of our list and they put them all up on a website for our wedding guests to have a look at. It was during this period that things first started to go wrong, as a number of our wedding guest were able to buy things that had already been bought.

A few phone calls to try and sort this out resulted in them saying that it wouldn't be a problem; they'd credit us when the list finished and we could put the credit towards something else. Karen also stopped receiving emails when guests had purchased items, so we no longer had any idea of who was buying what.

Eventually we got them to send us hard copies of the list showing who had bought what, but it was a major annoyance as they seemed incapable of just sending us a print out every week; Karen kept on having to demand a new one.

When we got back from our honeymoon we rang them up to find out what happened next. They were to send us some form which we were to fill out and it would all go from there. Unsurprisingly they send the wrong forms to Karen via email; they were supposed to send hard copies with a print out of the entire list.

A few heated phone calls later we discovered that they were claiming that we had a non-changeable list, where we thought we had a changeable one. They also hadn't removed the duplicate items from the list, so we were going to end up with seven of things when we'd only put four on the original list.

They eventually relented and agreed that we had a changeable list, which meant that we could move a few things around to make sure we got all the crockery. We than had to write out all the things that we were adding and removing on a set of forms, why this couldn't have been done online I have no idea. After a night of much gnashing of teeth we eventually had the filled out form ready to send back. We thought that all there was left to do was sit back and wait for a delivery.

We were given a date for the delivery of our list and we both cleared the Saturday of things to do so we could be there for when it arrived. Karen had been trying to get someone to tell us when the delivery would be, was it going to be morning or afternoon. As it turned out it was first thing in the morning, but the delivery man only dropped off two boxes.

Upon opening the main box we found a letter informing us that we were only getting part of the list as the rest was either out of stock, discontinued ort hadn't been sourced yet. This came as a bit of a shock considering that Karen had been on the phone to them the day before and they hadn't mentioned us not getting the entire list.

To say we were both majorly pissed off is an understatement, as not only had they sent a tiny fraction of the list, some of the items were wrong and incomplete. A quick phone call didn't clear anything up as they android at the other end of the phone couldn't do anything and we'd have to wait until Monday.

So I phoned on the Monday and had a bit of a rant and demanded to know the status of each item on the list; they'd get back to me I was told. I phoned again on the Thursday demanding to know why no one had bothered to get back to me and was told that they'd look into it and get back to us. You're beginning to see a picture here...

The long and the short of it resulted in Karen finding out that Debenhams and BHS were out of gift vouchers, so they couldn't send us those for the gifts that had been bought fro those stores. Somehow I doubt big department stores run out of vouchers. We also found out that they were ordering everything online, but not all stores but all their stock onto their websites so they were claiming that things were out of stock of discontinued if they couldn't find them on the websites.

The final insult came yesterday when my wee brother phoned me after watching Watchdog on the telly. Do you know they've gone bust he said, oh shit I said. According to their website they went into administration on Friday, amazing how they didn't mention to Karen on Friday that this was happening as they told her they were putting a personal shopper on the case to go and buy everything.

So now we find ourselves in the position where we have a few gifts from our wedding guests, but the vast majority are going to have to go back to their card companies and get a refund. This all leaves us in the slightly embarrassing position of having sent out the majority of our thank you cards to people whose gifts we haven't got.

The Gift Registry have completely and utterly fucked us over during the last few weeks and both Karen and I are deeply upset and annoyed that this has happened. We are now looking into our rights to see what can be done.