So I have one of those semi-ancient pod coffee makers. And it's tough to find coffee pods in stores- the selection usually isn't very good. So I started buying my coffee pods online. At first I was using coffeeforless.com- they were good until they did not send me a free bag of coffee I had earned. Long story short, I e-mailed them several times and told them that they were going to lose me as a customer. And they never responded or sent me my free coffee.

So I switched to coffeewiz.com. Again, this was good for a while. They had a great selection, and free shipping on orders over $50, which works out pretty well when the coffee comes sealed- you can order a few months' worth of coffee and it's fine.

The problem started when I ordered some "clearance" coffee in October of 2010. It was about half price and probably past its sell-by date (which is fine with me, I'm cheaper than I am picky). After about two days I received a call from a guy from New York (I live in Southern California) named Larry who had received my coffee order. I guess his name and address was on the outside and mine was on the form inside. He said he had tried to call their customer service and had not been able to talk to anyone, but he'd sent a couple e-mails (and they hadn't responded).

So I sent an email as well. After a few days both Larry and I had gotten responses, both from the same woman (who may be their only customer service representative). In both e-mails she claimed she hadn't heard anything from the other person, which is weird- how often do they mix up orders like this?

So eventually Larry was given a shipping label to send my order back. He warned me that a lot of the clearance coffee I had ordered was out of stock, according to the shipping form in the box. I wondered why I was not informed of this before my credit card was charged for the FULL AMOUNT of $50.50 that the total order came out to.

When I finally received a box from coffeewiz, it contained $11 worth of coffee- all the clearance coffee I ordered was out of stock. I received a refund of about $20 from coffeewiz at some point before I received this box, but that leaves about another $18.00.

After about another week of hearing nothing about a further refund I spent 45 MINUTES on hold on their phone line trying to sort this out. In order to stay on the line I had to hit "1" about every 30 seconds otherwise I would be "automatically redirected" to an answering machine (seriously, what the ***??- they really don't want to deal with people). Clearly, I was being stubborn. I wanted to talk to a person.

After those 45 minutes, I gave up because I was wasting my daytime cell minutes. I sent the same polite but angry email to every available e-mail address on the site. I told them I was disgusted with their handling of the situation. I told them that I was going to get my bank involved if my money was not refunded. THAT got their attention. I got another e-mail from the same woman who Larry and I had been communicating with before. After another 4 days, I got my $18. But the most apology I received was "We're very sorry..." Despite my threats to stop giving them business and to tell others about my bad experience, they did not make any serious attempt to keep me as a customer (eg, offering me a coupon or at least a more sincere-sounding apology).

Larry, during one of our conversations about the situation with my coffee, told me that over the last year he has had other similar bad experiences trying to get any customer service at that site.

So don't buy coffee from coffeewiz. I've been using coffeecow.com so far, and I guess we'll see what happens. I'm running out of coffee pod-selling sites.