West Elm’s narrow-slat bench is a joke

West Elm generally has nice stuff that’s easy to assemble. My dining table and chairs are from them and I had no problems. But the narrow-slat bench is impossible to assemble. I have received four different benches, each has exactly 0 holes to screw in the included 20 screws. To their credit, they have paid to ship all the replacement units to and from my house (at considerable expense I’m guessing), but that doesn’t help that the product is defective. A manager was supposed to check the last two units that were sent out, but they must have only checked that all three parts were in the box.

Part of me wants to ask for a refund, the other part wants to continue and see how many individual units they will send out before admitting defeat. We’ll see what they say when I call tomorrow. It’s a running joke between me and the UPS man, he always seems to show up the day after dropping it off to pick it back up. I don’t think he even has to look at the address when he sees the box in his truck.