Peloton — A Comedy of Unforced Errors

Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Like many other out there, my wife and I decided to setup a nice home gym after living the covid couch life for a while and realizing we needed something better. We had the money and recommendations from friends, associates, and coworkers that Peloton was great and their equipment was top notch, great service, and really fun classes.

Sounded great, we were in.

So, we went to their website and ordered a Bike+ on 07-Oct-2020. As part of the order process you get to pick a delivery date, the earliest available for us was 08-Dec-2020. A long wait, but we figured, fine annoying but tolerable given that they were busy and covid complications. A few weeks later we were looking for more stuff and convinced ourselves that their Tread+ was a great option. We were putting all the equipment in a basement gym, and their head guidance read (roughly) “tallest person +20 inches suggested height”, we were a few inches short of that, but read some accounts of others having installed in a lower height ceiling without incident and placed the order, delivery scheduled for 22-Dec-2020.

Days came and passed, and soon enough December 8th had arrived! Huzzah! It was then that I noticed that their email said that “XPO Logisitics will contact you the day before sometime after 4 pm to coordinate your delivery”. I had received no such call, no contact from Peloton. So I contacted their chat support and was told that my Bike+ delivery was for 22-Dec, I verified that that date was not for the Tread+ and they confirmed. I was fairly annoyed at that point, but fine, I can deal.

Then I got a call later that day from XPO Logistics to schedule my Bike+ delivery. I figured I had annoyed someone and they were bumping my delivery back closer to the original promised date.

“The earliest delivery we can schedule for your Bike+ is 26-Feb-2021.”

I was dumbstruck. I said, no that wasn’t acceptable and spent the next 3 hours on the phone with Peloton to be told that

1. They couldn’t get it to me sooner
2. Maybe I try calling them every week and ask for an earlier delivery
3. No offer of any sort of compensation

Keep in mind here, that when you order from Peloton you pay 100% of the price up front. So, now I’m giving them a free $2500 loan for over 4 months. Now suspicious of their ability to keep their promises I started asking about the Tread+ delivery date and was told (repeatedly, over multiple calls over multiple weeks) that that delivery date was fine.

Tread+ scheduled delivery date, no call, no contact, not a word from a company that now has nearly $7000 of my money. So I contact them and am now told that the earliest my Tread+ can now be delivered is 12-Jan-2021. This also took several multi-hour support calls.

Tread+ re-schedule delivery date, no call from XPO Logistics the day before to schedule; but I do get a call that the delivery will be at my front door in 15 minutes, and I had better be there or they are moving on. Fortunately, I was home and could take delivery. Whew.

Except not. I showed the installer where I wanted it in the basement and he puts hand up and says “Nope, I’m not installing it. It won’t pass calibration.”

Apparently, their installation “recommendations” are actually hard installation requirements; again, this was never seriously said at any point during the order process or the very delayed delivery process.

After another 3 hours on the phone getting passed around to every department; including getting passed to one department and being told that they need to send me back to the department that I was just forwarded there from. After waiting another 2 weeks I finally got my money back.

So, what’s the point of all this? What lessons can be learned?

1. Manage Expectations — If you know that you cannot reliably make delivery dates why promise them? Why schedule a delivery at order time? Why not delay until the Last Responsible Moment. Telsa gives order estimated delivery range and gives you more information as you get closer.
2. Contact Is King — If you see things potentially getting out of control, reach out to your customer / contact and let them know. Had Peloton reached out to me even a few days before the first busted delivery date and said “we’re really sorry, but we can’t make our promised delivery date; here’s some compensation and when we think we can get it to you”, I probably would have been fine. I certainly wouldn’t have cost them (and me) over 6 hours of support time.
3. Make Requirements Clear — If Peloton had been more clear in their documentation about ceiling heights they never would have taken an order which could not be fulfilled. The cost of preparing, shipping, and local delivery cannot be negligible.
4. Wars Are Won By Logistics — The delivery logistics branch of Peloton is running completely independent from the corporate arm. To the point where Peloton customer service representatives repeatedly told me to directly contact their logistics delivery company. While I’m sure that outsourcing delivery made sense in a board room, outsourcing the only time you have physical contact with your customers is a terrible idea.
5. Be Accountable For Your Actions — Throughout this whole process Peloton has abdicated responsibility for their actions as a company, from making me contact them repeatedly, wild west logistics, and inconsistent customer messaging.

Why write all this? Partially just to vent and get it out, partially to add my story to their reported issues, partially as an open letter to Peloton to clean up their act, and partially as an example what happens when a business loses control of their business.

The saddest part of all of this is that all of the errors and lessons learned were completely avoidable. Had some of this happened in the first months of the pandemic I would probably have been more forgiving, but this saga started in October. Well past the point where these issues should be well know and resolved.