A month ago, I went to get fitted for a tuxedo for a friend's wedding at After Hours Formal Wear. He specifically chose After Hours Formal Wear because they are a nationwide chain, and because they had locations in Northern California, saving me a trip down to Southern California in order to get fitted. The measuring and fitting took probably ten minutes tops at the Santa Clara store, and I figured it'd be easier to pick up the tux at Mission Viejo (where the wedding was registered) than it would be to pick it up at Santa Clara, drag the tux down to Southern California and return it to the Santa Clara store, and they told me it would be no problem, and I watched as they faxed the order through to Mission Viejo. Fast forward to two days before the wedding, when I and the groom go down to Mission Viejo to pick up our tuxedos. No problem with the groom's tux. It's there, it's ready and it fits. My tuxedo on the other hand... isn't there. In fact, the order isn't there. They have no record of me. They call the Santa Clara store to see if it had arrived there instead. It's not there. They try the Aliso Viejo store and it's also not there. My tuxedo is lost somewhere in limbo, if it exists at all. This is all made worse by the fact that the clerk that is helping the groom and I is a 60+ year old man with a thick European accent whose eyes are going bad. He misread my last name several times and confused a 408 for 808. "The phone number isn't in service", he declares. You wrote the number down wrong, i explain, and show him that the Santa Clara store is area code 408 not 808. I explain to him multiple times that the wedding is registered at the Mission Viejo store, he pulls out a thick 3 ring binder, flips through it and says "No, the wedding isn't registered here". The bride was ready to berserker, unpleasantly drag him into a corner and pummel him into his next incarnation when she heard these words come of his mouth.
An hour has passed since the entry into this store. The groom is done checking the fitting and has been waiting for some time to get this mess sorted out. The solution is simply to write another sales order and they assure me that by the next day at noon, the tuxedo and all the fittings will be there ready to pick up.
I arrive at the store after our wedding rehearsal the next day to find out that the tuxedo isn't there. It's at a different store -- the Aliso Viejo store. Luckily the store is close by and I can drive there to pick it up. When I get there, I find out that had it not been for a clerk at the Aliso Viejo store who noticed that the suit didn't belong there and called Mission Viejo, Mission Viejo never would have known it was at the Aliso Viejo store.
I'm cutting out a lot of pain and agony out of the retelling of the story, because there are some things that just can't be described without experiencing.
After Hours formal wear is completely inefficient.
You see, it turns out that After Hours Formal Wear suffers from 1980s technology syndrome. They fill out carbon paper based forms instead of web-based forms, and they file paperwork alphabetically instead of inputing that data into a searchable database. Pulling up orders consists of flipping through a 3-ring binder, and these people still use fax machines to transfer orders from store to store instead of using a networked nationwide computer system. Which may actually work in After Hours seeing as how most of the sales staff was completely computer illiterate. There was a computer there, which sat more like a decoration than anything else. They tried Control-Tab and Shift-Tab before finding Alt-Tab to do application switching.
I've never seen such inefficiency in my life.
So, long story short. Don't use After Hours Formal Wear unless you must and avoid the Mission Viejo store in particular at all costs.
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