Poor customer service pushes my buttons

My vintage Pendleton jacket and me

in happier times, before a button fell off.

Heavy snowfall forced an early dismissal at January’s Harrisburg Flea, which Stay attended as a vendor.

While I would have preferred an avalanche of sales that first Saturday of 2024, getting everyone home safely was the sensible and right priority for the flea’s organizers.

I moved my Honda Pilot from Commonwealth Avenue to Walnut Street outside Strawberry Square to load up. In that short distance, the car battery died.

Waiting several hours in the cold and darkness of my car for AAA to arrive for a jump-start and ultimately replacing the battery were annoyances, but ones I was able to remedy quickly.

What has proved more difficult is replacing a black plastic button on my vintage Pendleton wool coat that apparently fell off while I was clearing snow from the Pilot that day.

It’s another reminder of the low regard in which customer service is held these days.

‘We stopped trying’

I didn’t do anything about the button until September as fall beckoned.

I went to Pendleton’s website and initiated a chat. Was it possible to obtain a replacement button for the one I had lost? I wanted one with “Pendleton” written in it like the originals.

I was told to submit my request via email along with a photo of my coat. I did that on Sept. 5. Hearing nothing, I followed up on Sept. 9, Sept. 15 and Sept. 17.

The last one was met with this response: “Several attempts to deliver your message were unsuccessful and we stopped trying.”

Email protocol sums up Pendleton’s commitment to custom care quite nicely.

But I wasn’t ready to quit, so I went back to the online chat. I was told that Pendleton was having email problems and to try a second address.

I forwarded my original email on Sept. 24 and followed up on Sept. 27. I was supposed to have heard something within 24 hours.

It may be that email problems continued to plague Pendleton. But an empowered customer-service department would have resolved this with the second online chat.

Knowing that email wasn’t working properly, why would you send a customer in that direction again? Why not take my name and phone number and call me back with an answer?

A legacy brand such as Pendleton (it began in 1863) seemingly should have spare buttons on hand. But Pendleton is not the company it once was.

While my vintage coat was Made in the USA, Pendleton now offers a relatively small number of American-made products, mostly blankets.

Pendleton goes so far as to ship its American-made wool overseas to be manufactured into products such as its Men’s Wool Lawson Coat. (The Lawson has black buttons, but they don’t appear to say Pendleton on them.)

For all I know, a replacement button isn’t available. Either way, I would like to have received an answer to such a seemingly simple question.

Instead my inquiry remains an open case, a gaping hole in Pendleton’s customer-service program, like the space left where my button used to be.