I think it is - at least at one on-line company.
My husband had broken the nose piece on his favorite sunglasses while on a fishing trip a few weeks ago. Since he really liked them, and because it appeared to be an easy fix - just unscrew the nose piece and replace it - I went on-line to see if there was a company that may be able to help with this problem. After a little bit of looking, I found one, OpticsFast that's located on the East coast. Their site said they were able to repair the brand of my husband's sunglasses, so I followed the instructions to get a repair number, provide a credit card number for service and packaged and shipped them off. After about a week and a half I received an e-mail saying they were sorry but were unable to repair the sunglasses, but were happy to offer a $20 discount if we were to buy a pair of glasses from them. The e-mail also said they were going to ship the broken glasses back to me if they didn't hear from me by the next day. I immediately sent a reply to them telling them not to bother sending the broken glasses back to me and that they were not to charge my credit card for any return shipping charges. Well, I was rather surprised to receive another e-mail from them a couple of days later giving me a tracking number for the shipment of the broken sunglasses. I immediately shot off a reply asking if they had not received my message to not return the glasses or charge my credit card.....no reply - so back to their website to see if they had a "comments" area where I could express my displeasure with their customer service. It took some doing, but I eventually found an area where I could type a short message...to which I immediately received a very "cold" reply, pretty much saying that their policy is to always send broken sunglasses back and charge their credit card $20 even if the customer instructs them to discard the broken glasses and not charge their credit card. Their reasoning is that they don't know if it's really the owner of the glasses sending the e-mail, but someone else telling them to discard them because they're playing a prank on the owner. Give me a break....what kind of reply is that???? Not a reply like...."we're sorry you're not happy, but our policy is...", or "we apologize for not replying to your initial message requesting we not return your glasses we cannot repair, but our policy is....". Their customer service is definately not based on the customer service principles I learned years ago when I was a customer service rep for a couple of companies.
Enough of my "rant" about OpticsFast. However, my final comment is that if anyone needs glasses repaired - don't use that company because you'll end up paying for shipping the broken glasses to them, as well as back from them with no solution to your problem - just a loss of cash.
Oh, and by the way - I did not see anything on their website regarding their policy of returning broken glasses if they can't be fixed. But then, it's prob'ly buried somewhere in the teeny tiny fine print on an obsure page of their website.
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