Gevalia has a practically irresistible deal. For just a few dollars, they’ll send you a quite nice electric coffee maker, and some coffee. They also enroll you in their automatic coffee delivery program, but you can opt out any time.

So, we didn’t resist. The coffeemaker is fine. The coffees that we’ve tried are mediocre and over-priced, imo. So, after three shipments, trying different flavors — I’m too old to do take the come-on and run, which, by the way, is how I got my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1971, and I still feel bad about it — I decided to cancel. The Gevalia Web site lets you manage your account. You can select coffees, change the delivery schedule, suspend service … but not cancel.

So, I wrote an email to the support address they list. I got a robo-reply saying they’d get back to me in 12 hours. They didn’t. Two more messages later, and they still never acknowledged my email. So, I gave in and used that thing with the buttons and the speaker that you hold up to your face. What do you call those things? I got through quickly and was told that my account had already been cancelled.

Two lessons for retailers on the Web: 1. Acknowledge your flipping emails, or else we’ll eat up your time, money, and good will sending the same email over and over again. 2. Always always always give us a button to allow us to do the worst thing you can imagine. The alternative is that we’ll end the relationship and then blog our complaints about you out loud, no matter how petty it makes us look. [Tags: marketing retail gevalia ]

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