We're moving my son to a "big boy bed" for his 3rd birthday next month. When I tried to order the mattress online from Ikea, they told me my zip code was not in their systems and I could not complete my order.

Zip codes change. Never intended by the U.S. Postal Service to represent geographic areas, they instead represent delivery routes or regions. When an area's population density changes, the post office will add and/or split zip codes.

This is what happened to us. We bought a newly-constructed home in an area where a lot of construction was going on. A few months after we moved in, we were notified by the U.S.P.S. that our zip code would change from 98037 to 98087. It would change on July 1, 2004, but they would still honor mail addressed with 98037 for a year.

So, if you bought a U.S.P.S. licensed zip code database in the last 3.5 years (and they're available for as little as $39.95 a year with quarterly updates), you'd be aware that 98087 exists. And I've worked with these databases before. It's not complicated at all.

So why do you think Ikea hasn't updated their zip codes table in over 3.5 years? It's not hard. It's not expensive.

Must be that some heads need to roll at Ikea.com... and they can catch them in a beautiful Bastant basket.

UPDATE

I found an acceptable substitute on sale for the same price at J.C. Penney online. The mattress price was $129 and they wanted $108.25 for delivery. Huh? If they actually stocked this in their local store, I could do a 4-hour truck rental from the local Home Depot for $20 and just pick it up. It's just a twin mattress.

Apparently, the mattresses (and mattress prices) on J.C. Penney's web site are only available through the site and you can't pick up the mattress from the store. Plus it's not traditional mattress delivery where they'll bring it in, set up the frame if any, take away all the wrapping, and haul away the old mattress if any. Once they get it inside your front door, they're done.

So, while most stores charge $30-50 for full-service delivery, J.C. Penney online charges more than double that for a no-service delivery.

Bet you can guess J.C. Penney lost the sale too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.