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They rudely demand that you pay for their mistakes.

That's my experience with a recent purchase. Read on if you want to hear the whole story.

Purchased a large $389 rug late on a Wednesday evening. Delivery estimate was 3-5 days (a confirmation email said it would likely go out within 24 hours from their San Antonio warehouse; great, I thought, since I'm close by in Austin).

But the next day I received an email stating that the rug would be shipped from the manufacturer in New Jersey and it would not even leave the warehouse until the following week.

This delay was not the end of the world, but I decided to see if I could find another option somewhere else. And that afternoon I purchased another rug (turned out to be a better deal anyway). I immediately called RugStudio to cancel my order. I had a legitimate reason for cancelling (the lengthened delivery time), and there was plenty of time for them to stop the shipment. The phone rep said she'd start the process of issuing a full refund. She did offer to look into why the shipment was delayed, but I told her I had already purchased another rug. So she said she would immediately contact the manufacturer to stop the order.

Then... literally ten minutes later, I got an email telling me the rug had just shipped from a warehouse in New Jersey! This would have been great news had I not already purchased another rug. I cannot believe my cancellation had nothing to do with their expediting the shipment (this was just 15 hours after placing the order).

When I immediately called RugStudio back I was told the rug was already on the truck and there was nothing they could do about it. When I asked a manager about the previous email saying it wouldn't leave the factory until the following week, she told me -- very lawyer-like -- that that was just an estimate. (The email actually said the ship date could possibly change "by a small amount.")

Very curtly and unapologetically she told me I could either keep the rug or take full responsibility for shipping it back. (Since it's large, it would probably cost $100 or so to return.)

When I reminded her that I had been repeatedly mislead by their conflicting messages she refused to admit that RugStudio had made any errors. "Most people," she lectured me, "would have been happy to get it shipped so quickly."

I did not believe the rug was already on a truck and that the shipment could not be stopped. And, in fact, I called UPS, who said the tracking number was not yet in their system, which, the rep told me, meant that it could not possibly be on the truck yet. Later, when the rug did show up in UPS' system the earliest scan said: "ready for UPS" at 6:22PM (hours after RugStudio swore it was on the truck); then there was an origin scan at 8:34 and, finally, a departure scan at 11:05PM. It was coming from Georgia. New Jersey was no longer mentioned.

Bottom line, RugStudio quickly became hostile when I told them I did not want to pay for their mistakes, and all evidence points to them expediting my order as a form of extortion (I would have to pay for shipping a large, heavy rug if I expected to get a refund).

Bear in mind, my complaint is not about shipping delays. It's not even about all their conflicting messages. It is about ripping off a retired guy on a budget simply because they think they can get away with it.

"We had a bad experience initially with Comcast's customer service, but within hours of my posting a review on MeasuredUp I heard from Comcast." Mary