Headboard - Strutted or Full Depth?

silvercar

If your bedroom layout is never going to have the bed in the middle of the room, you won't need a full height head board.

Grumpy_chap

Thank you for your comments everyone.
We ordered the strutted version.  After discounts it was £270.75 so quite a lot less than the headline price.

Grumpy_chap

Our headboard arrived last week with some damage.
John Lewis have offered a collection and replacement which would be appropriate but is rather a lot of hassle and will take the 7 weeks again so that probably means after Christmas.  We'd like to get the house straight ahead of that.

As an alternative, John Lewis have offered a "damage allowance" credit which might be a better solution overall.  They said they will call me later today to agree an amount but suggested "in the range of £30 to £100". 
I suggested "not less than £100, but could they increase the discount if we accepted JL gift card rather than cash (credit card) refund?"
JL said they will call me and for me to suggest the amount that would be acceptable.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how much is a reasonable ask in this scenario?
Should it make any difference whether the refund is cash (credit card) or gift card?

victor2

When you think they've got to collect the damaged one, ship you a new one out, supply the new one FOC, and probably just write off the damaged one, it's going to cost them, even though they don't actually manufacture it. Assuming the damage is something you can live with, I'd aim for about a 50% refund, and negotiate from there.

Unless they're offering a much biggger gift card than cash refund, I'd go for the cash (on your credit card).

DullGreyGuy

To be honest that JL doesn't look full height to me but obv not measured it up 

Our bed comes with a different mounting system for the headboard than the typical UK one. Sure it wouldn't be hard to adapt if if we could be bothered but bought a package and it's still going fine. 

Googling standing headboards people claim it gives more structural integrity to the bed... I personally doubt it. Ours may slightly but that's because its on 4 brackets not because its full height.. full height and 2 mounting points I can't see doing much personally. 

The one question... what do you do with your divan? Is it covered by a valance sheet or out and proud? With a full headboard a valance sheet may be more difficult to use. Our headboard is fairly chunky and the divan is in the same material as the headboard and neither are covered so there is a slight asthetic benefit to the headboard being visible at the side and avoiding a gap being there but if you came into the room at the foot of the bed of had normal bedside cabinets this would be less visible than it is with ours. 

Grumpy_chap

So, to close this out, JL reverted back this evening to say that the £100 was approved if accepted on a gift card and that was the best they could offer, it has been approved by a Manager and as per my request in the call the other day.

I tried to put forward the 50% point as suggested by @victor2 but the lovely lady I was speaking with simply said my options now were to accept what I was happy previously with or return for a full refund and JL would not re-open negotiations on value.  I am not sure whether the higher repayment would have been possible at all; the lady was non-committal in whether anything more might have happened but she was certain it was never going to be re-opened now.  I wanted to reach an amicable outcome quickly as well.

To be fair, the damage is quite low, and has lessened since delivery, so this is probably a fair outcome.

The big learning point here is that I was taken a bit by surprise when JL asked me how much I would accept as a partial refund so gave an off-the-cuff number (which was influenced by JL indicating £30 to £100) and if the same type of thing happens in the future, then to ask for more at that point.

I was rather surprised by JL making the initial call and making it sound like my decision as to the amount when I suspected they would simply table one figure.  The whole approach is quite clever, though, as they called and said "in the range £30 to £100", no customer is going to then says "£50 will do", the customer says, as I did, "£100" - they go away and then approve that a couple of days later.  They have really just offered the one figure of £100 but made it seem it was my amount that I requested.

All-in-all, I have to say that JL customer service have been very good and very fair on this.

victor2

Good result then.