Would this be OK with you? False Advertising??
When I buy mint (another very light herbal) I have always got the full weight worth, regardless of volume. When I bought 100g at David’s, they filed the tin and put the remaining 50 -60 g in a larger bag. If they had to use a third package, they would have. I also bought 100 g of a white blend from then once with the same result – half in a tin and the rest in a bag. Yes, some teas are lighter but most retailers just charge the appropriate price per weight, just like they paid their supplier.
Melanie, I just wanted to commend your efforts to get in touch with them. I think your position is entirely reasonable, and I hope you hear from them soon—it would honestly be in everyone’s best interest if they acknowledged the mistake and offered to make it right, updated their descriptions/FAQs, rather than fighting you every step of the way.
I second this! I think you are doing this in a reasonable way – firm, but without being pushy, and you’re not trying to make them look bad publicly on their fb page etc unless it escalates! That puts the ball in their court to handle this respectfully before it really becomes an issue.
Well, I’m disappointed to report this morning that I have not received a message back from Adagio either by email or through FB.
Thank you madametj for leaving a message on their FB. I will look for it today. I too will be leaving a public message on their FB today, and emailing them one more time through their website.
It’s funny, my conscience hurts and pushes me to push this because I refer all my friends to their fandom blends. I hate to think of my friends being cheated because I referred them. It would be good customer service for them to send me another ounce of tea to say they care – but if they don’t change the way they present these blends and state straight off that they are selling volume not weight, I am going to have to publicly let all my friends and followers know I no longer recommend Adagio. Sigh.
It’s been encouraging to know all of you agree and everyone here has experienced purchasing tea by weight. That’s what I’ve always done. I don’t think I’ve ever weighed my tea to make sure a company actually sent me the right weight though! Haha!
I’ll let you all know today if something positive comes from this – but otherwise, I’ll let you know tomorrow that I’m having to publicly withdraw my endorsements of Adagio on Twitter and FB.
So… does anyone know of another place we can create our own blends?? I have one I am going to miss very badly if I have to delete my account :-(
“…my conscience hurts and pushes me to push this because I refer all my friends to their fandom blends. I hate to think of my friends being cheated because I referred them.”
This is exactly why I think so many people won’t at all think you’re doing “the wrong thing”. We’ve all been here—no one wants to recommend a less-than-stellar product or less-than-honest company to people. It ends up hurting your own reputation. I do hope they come through in a good fashion!
Hi Melanie, just wanted to let you know that I agree with everything you are doing with this situation. Thank you for taking them on and trying to get the wording changed. :))
You asked if we knew of anywhere you can create your own blend. It doesn’t work quite the way the fandom blends work at Adagio – but Design a Tea is a great little company and Brian the owner is a really fun helpful guy. If you have something you would like to recreate and can’t figure out how to do it through their options, just contact them, they are excellent with giving advice. I’ve ordered from them twice – and created some outside the box kind of stuff. They have tons of bases/flavors/herbs etc – more than what is on the general menu option – snoop further into the site – there are a lot of options.
http://www.designatea.com/
brian at designatea.com
Ok… so just as I was preparing to post something public on FB, I got a private message back. This is what it said:
“Melanie,
We understand your frustrations. We will be sure to escalate this matter to ensure proper resolution. In the meantime, we will forward your comments to our development team, who will investigate adding more realistic weights to the website. We suspect “3 oz.” was intended as a temporary place holder, describing the size of the pouch we use to package the blends. We apologize for the inconvenience and a member of our customer support team will reach out to you shortly.
Please visit us again soon, and let us know if we can be of any further assistance."
I had already sent another email through their website this morning. So I will wait today and see what they can do to fix this for all their customers.
I will let you all know. Thanks for the support!
After 2 emails, a tweet and a private message on FB (and madametj’s public FB msg), Adagio has sent me an email saying they would be happy to send me another ounce of tea.
However, my greater concern is that the website is changed so that it’s not deceptive. I’m accepting their offer for another ounce of tea, but asked them to please let me know or assure me that changes will be made to the website.
I promised to keep you updated. So that’s where it stands. Thanks ALL of you for your support. I really hope, together, we make a difference and help Adagio to improve their business.
That sounds great Melanie.
And I’m happy you’re still pushing. From the retail end of things, I can see them thinking you might just be a ‘greedy’ customer trying to scam them out of an oz of tea, so this shows that you weren’t just trying to get a freebie, but to fix a legitimate issue that they should take notice of! I hope they make the appropriate changes!
(And I’m not saying you are trying to scam them or that it even would be a scam with the way the website is misleading people – I’m just saying I’ve seen a lot of people do that sort of thing so they would be wary)
Yep – I totally get what you’re saying… and agree! I really hope they hear my message and don’t just write it off with sending me an ounce of tea. I thought about turning that down just to emphasize the other LOL!
It’s sad that you have to push this hard to even get a replacement ounce that you thought you were paying for in the first place, the cost of the ounce of tea isn’t worth fighting with you over or dragging this out and just hurts their customer service reputation. Other tea sellers i’ve had to contact about issues with orders have responded in hours with immediate offers to fix the problem.
It’s great that they sent you the missing ounce, but I agree with you. Until they fix the misleading information on the website, they haven’t resolved the issue.
Sherapop, the issue is still marketing transparency. Your Harney tins are transparent – you are buying 20 sachets, they clearly label them 20 sachets, everyone is happy. Except maybe people who don’t like their tea in sachets. ;) The issue with Adagio here is not serving count or brewing quality — it is that their confusing marketing is coming across as deceptive and pissing people off. It would like Harney telling you you’re buying a “20 sachet tin”, and selling you a tin that could hold 20 sachets, but only came with 15 sachets in it. Adagio’s “3 oz pouch” being sold with 2 ounces of tea in it is as confusing as hell, and that is the problem everyone is complaining about and wants fixed.
Not okay, this seems like a manipulative practice. Personally if our company sold tea in this matter we would feel highly unethical!
I should add that I agree that the correct weight should be indicated—or else omitted from the packaging, if they prefer to sell by volume. “Contents measured by weight.” or “Contents measured by volume.”
Of course: that’s just truth in advertising. I think that I may have given the impression that somehow I agree with the Adagio practice. I believe that in their custom blends they should probably simply talk about volume.
The ultimate problem with the blends is that the correct calculation of the weight is going to be very complex, and they do not want to do it. They could do it, if they set up an algorithm so that the weight is calculated with each component added to the blend, but they don’t want to bother with it. What they should do instead is sell the blends by volume. Just tell the truth!
Correct calculation of the weight wouldn’t be complex at all, mathematically speaking. It would just mean they’d have to weigh everything.
What it would be is much more labor intensive then volume based blending, and I think it would make the blends more expensive. I suspect that by working on a volume basis the over all wholesale cost of the teas to them averages lower, and allows them to set up a very even pricing scheme for the blends across the board.
I’m not sure that offering custom blends on such a massive scale would be possible for Adagio to do at such a low price point if they worked by weight.Yeah, its not complex at all. What’s happening is they’re being lazy. For example, if I wanted 50-50 blend of chamomile and peppermint and I order 3 ounces of it, what they’re doing is taking a 3 ounce container filling it halfway with peppermint and then topping it off with the chamomile (or so it seems from what we’ve heard. You’re not going to get 3 ounces of tea this way because chamomile is very light. The non-lazy way to do it is actually take out a scale, weigh out 1.5 ounces of chamomile, put it aside, weight out 1.5 ounces of peppermint, mix them together and then package it. Not complicated at all if you ask me.
Interesting topic. I have considered selling our teas by volume and just offering full pouches of our tea instead of weighing them all out. It would save a lot of time in packaging, but I didn’t know how customers would feel about it. I would never do that without clearly labeling it as fluid ounces and sold by volume, but it definitely would save time.
We considered something similar. The problem, as you know, is that teas are purchased by weight. So, the only way to work it out is to have a pretty good idea of how much a pouch of a particular tea would weigh, on average.
We’ve considered selling popular teas per bag and saying that the bag is “approximately 3 oz” (for example). In our mind, this only works if we’ve figured it out that the bag will always hold more than 3 oz. That way, the customer knows that they’re getting about 3 oz, but if they weigh it, they will always find more than that.
We ultimately decided against it because we always felt like if we charge, say, $15 for “approximately 3 oz.”, then the customer would be right to send us approximately $15 – especially since we know EXACTLY how much those 3 oz cost us.
We have an internal “this much or more” policy. Whereby we measure everything, but if you order 100g, and we scoop up 110g, that’s on us. We will try to aim a bit over to allow for the possibility that a customer’s scale is off a bit, should they decide to check up on us. Better to discover you’re getting free tea than believing you just paid for tea you didn’t get.
Cheers.
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