We registered for our wedding at The Bay, not really because we wanted to, but because there really wasn’t a better option. The Bay, for all its faults, has a wide variety of stuff which is better than if we registered at 10 different stores. But it was a horrible experience having to go through The Bay’s gift registry. Here are a couple of my peeves:

• You can’t add/remove items online, you had to actually go into the store to scan items (and you “remove” by saying you want 0 of an item).
• The in-store scanning is kind of neat, you’re given what looks like a wifi-enabled PDA barcode scanner running Windows Mobile. Except it crashed often and you would have to go back to the registry office and get a new one configured to your registry number etc. Oh yeah, you couldn’t remove items that you scanned in on the device either.
• The selections is crap, there’s a lot of stuff I realized we needed, but they don’t sell.
• The prices are crap. It’s better to just ask for gift cards and then hunt for you own deals
• I couldn’t find a link on the online view of the registry, to link directly to the registry. This seems like a very basic thing that a customer would want to do – maybe they want to email it to their friends. But there’s no link and the only way to access the registry is if you typed in the registry owner’s name. Eventually I did find a direct link, but through googling and finding someone else’s Wedding page.
• Why does the online list not have a full text description of each item and/or a picture? I don’t even remember what each of the entries refer to now

Basically I want a registry site that works online. You would think that The Bay would want to reach out to clientele like us considering they are not doing a lot of business with our demographic. I did look for an online option for a registry, one which you can integrate multiple stores, but they don’t work that well (and keep spamming you with other garbage). So really, in Canada, there is no good option – just ask for red pockets!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: dumb, geeky, weddingplanning