Weddingbee boards

We registered at Bed Bath and Beyond and Pottery Barn and haven't had any trouble. We've gotten a few gifts that were broken and we just took them back to Bed Bath and Beyond and they exchanged them with no problems. 

I can't rave enough about Amazon.com.  They have the most amazing customer service I've ever experienced- they gave me a refund on MP3 downloads!  No questions asked, I told them the qualityh was bad and they immediately refunded me.  I got an air mattress and there was a hole in it, they sent me by 2 day delivery a new one before even receiving the old one.  I love amazon.  Their registry is the easiest, most intuitive function I've seen on a website.  I was done registering in an hour.

Macy's was AWFUL.  I was in tears when we left.  They are terrible.

We registered at BBB, Crate and Barrel and Target.

We've heard horror stories about Target, but we wanted a few things from there, and made a very small registry of about 10 things. The bulk of our stuff is at the other two stores.

C&B was so easy. We had a great experience in the store.

BBB was ridiculous. One, they take you into a special room, and a sales person fills out all your information, which is kind of a pain. I could have done it myself much faster. It was like a whole meeting. We had a similar experience to Melissabegins. They guy really pushed us to register for a lot of fancy china, and kept saying, "People don't HAVE to get it for you, but they might want to! We urge all our customers to register for whatever they want, most items in the $100-$500 range!" It was weird. Then he showed us around the store like we'd never been there before and told us about the brands they recommend (even ice cream scoops). By the time he gave us the gun and let us free, I was in a bad mood, haha. But after that, it was smooth sailing. I would recommend starting your registry online first, and then going to the store to check out everything in person to bypass the whole song and dance.

We registered at Sears (in the store with a scanning gun and I've added some things online) and also at our local Home Depot. We really wanted to register at Lowe's, but they discontinued/are discontinuing their registry, so that was disappointing. We also registered at honeyfund. We're both encores and I own my house, so we have all of the "usual" registry stuff. I've been really happy with our honeyfund registry and Sears was easy-but we haven't gotten anything off of it yet bc we have 2, maybe 3, showers coming up in the next couple of months.

@ sillygoose Well, we were told over the phone to just show up before X time at night, no appointment needed, and we get there and sat ignored for 45+ minutes.  We finally flagged an associated and said we needed help, and apparently the info I was given was incorrect- I needed an appointment and the lady had left for the day.  A manager gave us their crappy, low tech, outdated gun and when we went to scan things, it wouldn't tell you what you just added! Did we just add a single plate, the whole set, which version of the set?  Did we have to scan the plate 8 times to get a full set?  Who knows!  Very poorly designed system since it didn't tell you what you had selected, or ask for confirmation, or give you the option to delete.  Their website is not much better, I deleted the registry entirely.  I was so frustrated with the whole experience that I just left the clunky, cheap plastic registry gun on the desk and left without having registered for a single item.  I can understand a lack of associates when its busy, but there is no reason for a high end company to use a lazy, cheap, rudimentary automated process like those outdated registry guns.

Now, if I were an expensive store like Macy's and I was interested in getting as many customers as possible, and god forbid even improving the user experience and customer service, I would design a hand-held wireless high definition photo/video system that would scan the barcode and show a photo of the item, allow you to select color options, and suggest further purchases based on your current selection. You could probably get an iPhone app to work perfectly for this function, change from bar codes to short numerical/alphabetical codes the couple can punch in to a search field, or even use the camera to "scan" the code and let a text recognition program do the work. You could even provide headphones and double audio jacks so that the bride and groom could each use earphones to listen to video demonstrations of kitchen appliances, etc. How neat and what a great way to draw in the customer by showing a clip of the Barefoot Contessa or Rachel Ray using that Kitchen Aid standing mixer to make scones, or listen to Alton Brown discuss the pros and cons of immersion blender models which oh, look at that!  Here is the exact immersion blender he suggests!  It would be a great sales tool.  Easy and fun to use, meaning better customer service and user experience, more sales, and a great way to incorporate cross-brand marketing with your affiliates.

So, the customer service was bad, yes, but mostly I became very frustrated at the slow, ineffective, nebulous, outdated process in general.  It would have taken us hours doing what we could (and did) accomplish in minutes on Amazon.

EDIT: Sorry for the long post, haha!  When I have a complaint, I REALLY have a complaint!  And I spend a lot of time looking for ways to fix it.

I am only registered at Amazon.com and love it so far. I like that my guests will be able to shop around.

We had similiar woes with BB&B. We walked in the store on a Sunday night about 45 minutes before closing - I think they close at 6pm here in the summer months. The "regsitry expert" escorted us into a side room and asked us a bunch of questions that I thought were totally unnecessary. It took him forever and he kept prying as to why we were registering there, what we were looking for, that we should register for over 400 items, etc. etc.

He acted like it was the only place we were registering. He literally tried to make us register for certain items- there expensive $500 pots and pans, china, etc.

After walking us around the store for 20 minutes telling us WHAT we should register for and what MOST people register for we had about 15 minutes to actually register. When we gave him the gun back at the end of the night he asked us why we hadn't registered for more items and that the 60 items we did register for would all be gone before our shower.

THEN... he told us that the porcelain white, square dinner plates and salad plates we registered for were only for "everyday use" and started telling us all about their china, blah blah blah. I told him at the beginning of the meeting that we were not interested in their china as we had no purpose for using it and we already have our own set of china from my grandmother. He KEPT pushing the china and then basically said that the plates we had registered for were "just going to crack" and were "not to be used for dinner parties." I was getting pretty upset at this point because he was like a telemarketer!!!

I asked him whey they sold those plates if they have a history of cracking... and that finally shut him up.

Either way, he called me a few days later telling me I needed to come back and register. Then suggested that he take it upon himself to register for "essentials" since we might be too busy to come back in the store. I told him a very polite "NO THANKS!" and never went back. Most of our stuff got purchased from the store, except for the towels, but needless to say I didn't care I was not going back into that store.

/rant.

I hated BB&B.

We had a wonderful experience at BB&B as well, it was quick, they didn't bother us much except to offer us water, and the guy listened to what we had to say. He actually told us to be careful about registering for things over $50 since it could be hard for guests to spend that much unless a number of them got together for a big gift. And we've managed the list online a bit since.

We also registered at myregistry.com since there were a lot of items we wanted that were exclusive to certain stores. That definitely requires internet-savvy friends, but most of our friends are and the gifts on there are ones they probably would want to buy us anyway.

And we tried to register at a local kitchen store, but it really hasn't gone well as they aren't equipped to handle online orders despite claiming so originally. Despite calling several times they just won't update our list! At this point we figure that if they don't get our registry up in time it's their problem, and we'll just put the stuff we originally wanted from them on the BB&B one. Kind of sad, though, I really did want to support a local company.

 Bed, Bath, & Beyond did the pushy thing with us too. He had us pick plates & silverwear from a book along with some photo albums and glasses. He then escorted us around the store while I held the clipboard and he discussed each item with my FH & he scanned the items for us (GIVE ME THE SCANNER THAT'S THE FUN PART!!!). Luckily I have a great FH who kept me in the conversation & knew when I would want to give input (he is the cook so he picked the pots & pans, knives, cooking utensils- I picked the decorations & bedding). When we got home and saw the prices of the things we picked from the book we immediately deleted and added some other items. We eventually went somewhere else for dinnerwear as they didn't have anything that was really our style. We have managed it online since then. From the other posts it appears the pushy thing is just a matter of who you get in the store. I also recommend doing what someone said earlier & just let them know you would like to look on your own as you & FH may need to discuss things as you go.

@mrsmike: I work at Target on the weekends & we can only scan registry items in if we are given the sheet to scan or your guest has registry # with them. There may be some employees that don't take the time but all in all it isn't a hassle, you scan the paper add the items (push a button to accept) and it's done. Not like theres much work to it at all. So maybe your guests are just asking for gift reciepts and not bringing the actual registry page with them.