Another Shoe Story

Remember a few weeks ago when I tried and failed to get those Spring Court canvas sneakers from J. Crew? I contacted the customer service person who has helped me in the past, and he said he would try to find me a pair, but that it might take some time.

By last Friday morning I hadn't heard from him, but I was making a quick pass through the sale section of their site and saw that the white sneakers were back in stock in my size. I wanted to just go ahead and place an order, but I'd gotten the original, two-right-shoes pair with an extra discount, and due to the circumstances (I was told they had more in stock, a replacement order was placed, then that order was canceled almost a week later) I felt that if I was going to get these shoes, I should be getting them at the discounted price, so I shot an email to my guy telling him the shoes were again available online.

He responded that he was not at work, but he was looping in one of his coworkers to process the order for me. Since these reps work in the same location as J. Crew's warehouse, she was able to go into the warehouse, get a pair of the sneakers, and confirm that the box did in fact contain one left shoe and one right shoe. She shipped them to me via overnight, they arrived Monday, and I'm happily wearing them today.

They're good shoes, and I like them a lot. One thing that's unusual about the Spring Court shoes is the design of the sole. There are four holes on each side of the sole, which open into chambers inside. The rubber insole (which is topped with the same canvas as the body of the shoe) rests loosely on top of these chambers, creating small air spaces and allowing air to circulate around the feet.

This is about the fourth time in the past 18 months or so that J. Crew's customer service has stepped up to resolve a problem for me, or just to locate an item I was looking for but had not been able to get online or in a store. They are pros, and they do things right. I didn't do anything special to merit this treatment; I simply used the contactus@jcrew.com email address which I found on their site. (To be fair, my mother has had problems ordering gift cards for me: two years in a row, the gift card was mailed to her instead of to me. No one can explain why it happened, but it was fixable, and they took care of it.)