Decent (not fantastic) coffee. Dangerous automatic rebilling and unordered "gifts."
by Andyman - Written: Oct 08 '08
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This place is like the Columbia House of coffee. You sign up for some cheap-sounding deal and then find yourself sucked into a never-ending membership with automatic reorders showing up in your mailbox without your intervention.
The coffee is okay but absolutely nothing special. People who rave about Gevalia coffee have obviously never drunk anything but Folgers their entire lives. Gevalia coffee is decent and they package it well in vaccum sealed foil. But it's no comparison even to the finer blends available at a Whole Foods, Peets, or even Starbucks.
Like Bose, Gevalia has developed a strong mail-order brand, and they use it to push average product out at high prices. I've tried maybe 6 different flavors of theirs and none was that memorable. Again - they were all better than canned Hills Brothers swill, but all this BS about Gevalia having the best coffee in the world is just wrong.
I've had a few foibles with them. They ship me an unannounced special gift coffee every few months: 4 bags of coffee I didn't ask for, on top of the recurring deliveries which I struggle to drink quickly enough. They auto-bill me for these special gift blends, too. And they ain't cheap. Once I picked up the phone, told them I didn't order it, and they reversed the charges and tell me to keep it.
You might think "woo! free coffee!" but it's obvious they make their money on people who set and forget their memberships, surrender their credit cards, and get billed on auto-pilot from now to the grave (and probably beyond). I don't like this kind of business, and I never should have signed up.
I just spent about 45 minutes trying to cancel my account and - as you might expect, found it extremely difficult. I was ultimately NOT able to cancel. The runaround they gave me was obviously designed to perpetuate this cycle, squeeze another 6 months of billing out of me until I come up for air in the midst of my busy life and remember to deal with Gevalia again.
Why couldn't I cancel? The cancel option online literally links to a 404. I called them but they cannot pull up my account with any of my information. I gave my phone number to an Indian customer service rep no less than 8 times, and spelled my last name for her about 10 times. I swear she was probably sitting in her kitchen making chai and forcing me to repeat myself until I got frustrated and hung up, which I did. She insisted my account number was the only real way to find my account, but the website does not show it to me. So we reached an impasse.
And meanwhile the shipments keep coming. You can suspend shipments quite easily, but only for up to 25 weeks. And as I've said cancelling is pretty much impossible.
Recommended:
No
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? coffee
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