5-Jul-22 – When Americans decided to sit back in their Lazy Boy chairs over the past couple of years to ride out the pandemic, something remarkable happened.

Folks started ordering billions of dollars of stuff online – furniture, bath and kitchen items, gardening supplies, designer clothing, fancy gym shoes, perfume, lipstick, Viagra, and every other consumer item imaginable.

Based on this writer’s personal experience, America’s truck, train, and airplane delivery systems were not up to the challenge, especially on those bulky items shipped by truck from the warehouse and aimed for a “room of choice.”

This past week we had home delivery disasters that seemed like they were cursed. Everything arrived damaged. It was as if Bushman – the legendary 550-pound Lincoln Park Zoo gorilla – had used our home deliveries as playthings in his cage. In 1950, Bushman (left) was noted for bouncing auto tires off of his cage walls. Lincoln Park Zoo

Believe it or not, these are the facts:

Vanity top disaster. Shopping online, my wife ordered a handsome 48-inch-wide bathroom vanity on Amazon.com. The lure? The vanity was well-priced – at about $1,100, a few hundred dollars under the competition. After a few weeks, the 200-pound white vanity cabinet and its gray cultured marble top arrived at our house.

We paid $20 in advance to have the truckers haul the box to the proper level of the house, and tipped the workers another $20. The following day, when my carpenter opened the box, the marble top was crushed in three pieces like a broken cookie. It looked as if it had been thrown off the truck by Bushman.

Replacement vanity top disaster. Trying to speed up the installation, we went to Menard’s in Morton Grove to find a replacement 48-inch vanity top. We purchased a nice one for $220 and sent our carpenter to pick it up.

Later, when the carpenter opened the box, he discovered the corner of the replacement top was chipped – obviously, another Bushman disaster. Luckily, there was a similar replacement top in stock, so we only lost three man-hours during the top-hunting adventure. However, we had to stand in the “return line” and wait to get a credit for the damaged item.

Medicine cabinet disaster. The next day, we ordered delivery of two 36-inch wall-hung, mirrored medicine cabinets from Lowe’s. It cost about $320 for the pair.

This is the basic three-mirrored medicine cabinet design used by landlords across the city. The online description of the Tri-View cabinet cheerfully states:

“Fully assembled for easy installation, you’ll be well on your way to creating your ideal bath with all the storage you need. Plus, it comes with a five-year limited warranty.”

Well, when our carpenter arrived to hang the cabinets, upon opening the boxes, he discovered that both were damaged – one with a shattered mirror, the other with a crushed frame.

Our mistake was ordering online. This created the chance that some “delivery professional” earning $15 an hour would toss our online home product off a loading dock, or bounce it off a truck or dolly, creating an unusable pile of rubble.

The happy ending occurred when Lowe’s offered to replace the damaged medicine cabinets, which allegedly were in stock. All we had to do was haul the damaged items back to the store, wait in the “return line” for a while, and buy the same cabinets.

Unfortunately, the popular cabinets were not in stock. They are on back order at all of the local stores until January 2023.