Sur La TableReviews of surlatable.com

This review is in regard to customer service. I had previously had salt and pepper grinders and loved them. Lost them in a flood and wanted to replace them. I asked my daughter to order some for me for Mother’s Day, but unfortunately, she did not remember what kind I had had. She got me very expensive ones that required 12 batteries (!) — and since it was for Mother’s Day, a gift that I did not receive right away & would definitely not use, needing 12 batteries. I called the store asking if I could bring them in to exchange. They told me it was over 30 days and that was not possible. They advised me to go through the online store. I did that, was basically told the same thing about 30 days, and then the person helping me went over and above by getting an approval for me to return them and get a store credit. Because those were so expensive, I was able to order several things besides the salt and pepper grinders, and I made sure I had enough on the order to qualify for free shipping. So my order comes, and there is only the pepper grinder, even though on the order form, it says salt AND pepper grinders. I called, telling them that the salt grinder never came. They advised me that the wording is misleading, that you have to order them separately, even though it says salt AND pepper grinders. I spoke to Chris Hernandez who explained it to me. He understood and agreed that since I was paying more to get the salt grinder, I should get free shipping, but his supervisor, Heidi, told him that was not possible. I asked to speak to her, and she was very condescending, rude, and told me that they would not give me the free shipping. I literally spent hours on the phone and online with this company, just trying to resolve exchanging high-end salt and pepper grinders that I never used. In my experience, this company is very misleading in their advertisements and I will never use them again. This is because of lousy customer service from the supervisor, Heidi, not due to the quality of the products. No wonder their stores are closing.

Horrible company. Horrible experience. I have returned my order SF0006592170 in good faith back to the company with the prepaid return label they have provided to me and the return was lost in transit by UPS. Surlatable has opened a claim with UPS about this which was solved in my favor, and UPS has accepted responsibility for the loss and paid the claim in the full amount to Surlatable. After telling this to Surlatable, they are informing me that they can not assist me and to contact my bank. They are stealing money from UPS which was supposed to be directed to me, and they are keeping my money paid as well. This is a direct violation of my consumer rights Uniform Commercial Code § 2-510 Effect of Breach on Risk of Loss the responsibility and risk of loss transferred entirely to your company upon me tendering of the package to UPS. You are ignoring your legal responsibility and unfairly holding me financially responsible despite the claim being paid in full to your company.

I had been a customer of Sur la Table for decades, but in recent years they have adopted to abusive practice of re-adding customers to their email marketing lists periodically without customer consent. Complaints about this behavior to customer service are not taken seriously. In spite of not having made a purchase with them in years over their persistent past abuses of my email address, they clearly went through their records again to re-add everyone and are now sending me marketing emails again as a "VIP" customer. "No" doesn't mean "no" to this unethical and disrespectful company. There are plenty of other cookware stores. Update Regarding Company Response: Whenever I bring up this issue, I receive a boilerplate response just like this one saying they will look into it and make sure it doesn't happen again. Within a year or two, it happens again. Rinse, repeat. This is a systemic abusive email practice which they refuse to acknowledge (though, to be fair to their customer service agents, this is probably being implemented at a higher level within their marketing department than their front line customer service reps have any knowledge of and they probably have no idea that the messages they "forward to the appropriate department" will not result in the implementation of appropriate changes).

UPDATE: June 8th: I was contacted by Heidi (review responder) telephonically and was promised a follow up email to address. That was a week ago. STILL NO email received. I did however, receive the replacement unit - a totally different, entry level unit!!!! Just when you think it couldn’t get worse… it did. Literally at a loss for words at how this company operates! SHOCKING! Sur La Table’s customer service is as disappointing as their faulty products. I’m now on my third air fryer due to the same recurring issue. After countless emails (only one of which was answered), I was told by the manager—Courtney—that my replacement had shipped and been returned. No tracking number, no notification, no explanation. When I asked for help, I was blamed for not contacting UPS—despite never being given the tracking info to begin with. Courtney was dismissive, talked over me, refused to address the delay, and outright said she “won’t go backwards” to discuss what had happened. No apology. No accountability. Just rudeness and deflection. This is not just bad service—it’s a complete disregard for customers. Shop elsewhere. You deserve better.

Terrible experience!!! If I can rate this 0 star I will. Paid for a class and was cancelled last minute because I was the only one that signed up! Like why is that my problem! I paid for the class then teach me the class! It doesn't even mentioned anywhere that there's a minimum number of students! Why offer a class when you can't even fullfill the service of teaching it! Shouldn't have allotted my time for this company only to cancel the last minute! Will not go back to this place ever again! P.S. They took down my review in their website! It looks like they filter out some bad reviews! Not good!

This company is a rip off! Customer service is ABYSMAL! Rude sales staff with nasty attitudes, completely unhelpful, and incompetent about the products they sell.

They induce you to sign up for email marketing with a 15% off coupon. But instead of having the coupon code auto-fill to make it easy to receive the discount, they make you type in 15 characters (separated by dashes) at the end of the transaction. This seems like an obvious attempt to get what they want (an email address to send countless marketing emails) without providing what they promised in exchange. I canceled my purchase and will buy my kitchen supplies from a retailer who has some respect for its customers instead of using tricks like this.

Lack of communication with warehouse. Poor or no communication on return/refund status in their customer service technology, so customer service provides inaccurate info to customer and customers are not notified via email/text/phone calls of actions underway. Sadly customers are given false information when they call because customer service doesn't have the technology tools to provide a truthful, accurate status. Supervisor I spoke to was rude and rigid... no apologies or accommodation offers to minimize my frustration, all my effort and time in trying to simply get a refund. Their business model is seriously flawed because customer service is definitely not a key priority or deemed critically important to their strategic viability and success. I will not deal with them again.