The William Sonoma Turkey Scandal

The first time I heard about Thanksgiving was when I came to the United States as an exchange student. Therefore, I may not have an as deep appreciation for turkeys as other Americans. However, I know that Thanksgiving is celebrated on one specific day, the fourth Thursday of November, which is November 28th this year. This means that if you order a turkey, it cannot arrive November 29th. Usually, we buy the turkey at the grocery store, but to save time we decided to buy the entire thanksgiving dinner on-line this year, including the turkey. This turned out to be a very bad idea.

A majestic Turkey looking into the camera
Photo by ASHISH SHARMA on Pexels.com

A few weeks ago, my wife ordered a thanksgiving dinner, including the turkey, on-line from William Sonoma. There were two options, immediate delivery or delivery for Thanksgiving. She chose delivery for Thanksgiving. The turkey comes frozen, and it needs three days to thaw, so she assumed that was taken into account. Soon my wife realized that the delivery date was set to November 27th, which wouldn’t work, and they couldn’t change it, so she cancelled it. We were told that before they could cancel the order, they needed approval from the merchant. This was around three weeks ago. However, my wife went ahead and ordered the Thanksgiving dinner for immediate delivery instead with a delivery date of November 22.

November 22 came and went but no turkey, so she called William Sonoma. She was told that the delivery date for the immediate delivery had been changed to November 29, the day after Thanksgiving. By the way, they still had not heard back from the merchant regarding canceling the first order. She made a few more phone calls to William Sonoma but it was clear that the new date was indeed set for November 29 and could not be changed. So today she cancelled that order as well and we went to the store to buy a frozen turkey and the other things you need for Thanksgiving. We don’t know if we are going to end up with three turkeys, two arriving too late for Thanksgiving. It is certainly the last time we order Thanksgiving dinners online and certainly not from William Sonoma.

A photo of a frozen turkey wrapped in white plastic.
This is the turkey we bought at Central Market here in Dallas today.

In Sweden, my native country, Thanksgiving is not celebrated, and turkey is not a very common dish. However, Turkey (Kalkon in Swedish) has a second meaning, “a fiasco”. For example, a bad movie would be a Turkey. You could say that the William Sonoma Thanksgiving dinner online business is a “Turkey”.

Update

The two William Sonoma Thanksgiving dinners with turkeys arrived this afternoon, in time, which we did not expect. We gave one of the turkey dinners to a friend who happened to be here when the turkeys arrived. We have one extra but we’ll use it for another occasion. In the end it wasn’t so bad. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

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Author: thomasstigwikman

My name is Thomas Wikman. I am a software/robotics engineer with a background in physics. I am currently retired. I took early retirement. I am a dog lover, and especially a Leonberger lover, a home brewer, craft beer enthusiast, I’m learning French, and I am an avid reader. I live in Dallas, Texas, but I am originally from Sweden. I am married to Claudia, and we have three children. I have two blogs. The first feature the crazy adventures of our Leonberger Le Bronco von der Löwenhöhle as well as information on Leonbergers. The second blog, superfactful, feature information and facts I think are very interesting. With this blog I would like to create a list of facts that are accepted as true among the experts of the field and yet disputed amongst the public or highly surprising. These facts are special and in lieu of a better word I call them super-facts.

92 thoughts on “The William Sonoma Turkey Scandal”

  2. I’m reading this post under my cover because we’re in bed with lights out. I couldn’t stop laughing (without making sounds) about your turkey adventures, Thomas!!!
    Are they serious about delivering the turkey after Thanksgiving? Do they know which day is Thanksgiving? Hahaha 🤣😂🤣. I agree with Darlene!

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      1. Oh my gosh! Keep trying to cancel it. If they can stop the cancellation, return it to get a refund. If the demand for refund is not successful, dispute the charges. Keep all the documents, save them as PDF to support your dispute.
        You may have to get a cooked turkey dinner for Thanksgiving.

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    2. Thank you so much Miriam for the very helpful advice. At precisely this moment we got both William Sonoma turkey dinners delievered. So we have everything before Thanksgiving, but three turkeys. We bought an additional turkey from the store because we thought we would not have any. However, we gave one turkey to a friend who is currently at our house and the extra turkey we will just save for later, so in the end it wasn’t so bad.

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      1. I’m sure your friend appreciate your sharing, Thomas! When I had my after-school business, my associate always ordered cooked turkeys at a restaurant and gave coupons to friends and associates to pick them up. I had more turkeys than needed and gave some away.

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  3. What a hoot!!!! Oh well, all is not lost. One Turkey for Thanksgiving. One for Christmas dinner. And one to celebrate New Year’s Day. I’m a typical American, right? Always seeing the bright side of everything. lol!!!!

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    2. Thank you so much Laura. Incidentally the two William Sonoma turkey dinners just arrived this afternoon, so they were in good time. We gave one of them to a friend who was here and who had not bought turkey dinner and we are saving the third turkey for another occasion. So it turned out not too bad. Not exactly what we wanted but less bad. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving

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  5. Sad to hear Williams Sonoma let you down. I think a note to their CEO is in order. Here’s her information. I’m sure she would like to know about this poor service. A nice straightforward unemotional note detailing this situation could work wonders. Good luck.

    Ms Laura Alber CEO  Email lalber@wsgc.com   Telephone415-421-7900

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  8. What a fiasco! I’ve heard of friends ordering their whole Thanksgiving dinner online and not running into problems like these. It shouldn’t have to be this hard.

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    1. Yes a fiasco, except it got a little bit better this afternoon. The two William Sonoma turkey dinners arrived (so the cancellation did not work). At least they are on time. We gave one of the turkey dinners to a friend who was here and needed one, and the exra turkey dinner we are just going to save for another occasion.

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  9. Oh, dear, so sorry! I hope you and your family have a great Thanksgiving despite all this runaround. And I sure you have freezer room for two turkeys, just in case. 🙂

    Like many funny stories. it’ll be more fun to tell than to live through.

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    1. Thank you so much Denise. It got a little bit better this afternoon. The two William Sonoma turkey dinners arrived (so the cancellation did not work). At least they were on time. We gave one of the turkey dinners to a friend who was here and could use one, and the exra turkey dinner we are just going to save for another occasion.

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  10. Oh what a strange set of circumstances. I’m sure it seemed so easy to just order the whole meal. Then disaster came. In reading comments I hear you did finally receive the orders. From none to too many, though! This will be a story for re-telling for years to come. haha 🙂

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    1. Yes you are right Barbara. The two William Sonoma turkey dinners arrived unexpectedly. At least they were on time. We gave one of the turkey dinners to a friend who was here and could use one, and the extra turkey dinner we are just going to save for another occasion. It looked worse than it turned out to be in the end. Best would have been just one turkey dinner on time. I am going to update the post next.

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  11. Wow, that’s extremely unprofessional on their end. How disappointing. Turkey isn’t popular in Kenya either, in fact till very recently I never even saw it on the menu. These days I see it occasionally at restaurants tourists tend to go to more. I think the Swedish second meaning was a bit of a warning haha.

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    1. The two turkeys arrived yesterday at the same time and we had a friend over who was happy to have one free turkey dinner. Now we have two but we are saving one for later. We ended up paying for three but it was a little bit better than the two William Sonoma turkeys arriving too late. I have to admit I have not seen much turkey outside of the United States. It’s like a tradition here. Americans are different in some respects I guess. They have a sport that they call football, that you play mostly with your hands, that should rather be called “hand-egg”, and they don’t use the metric system, ignore much of the international culture and eat lots of turkey.

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      1. At least you were able to get the turkeys and definitely better than William Sonoma. Yes, they have their own traditions there. I’ve always wondered why they call it football when they hold the ball with their hands while playing. They also spell everything differently which I find interesting.

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    2. Yes when I came to the US the first time, I was an exchange student, I did not know of the existence of the game and I thought it was funny they called it football when it looked like similar to rugby. Football to me was what is called soccer here. Hand-egg is a better name. I was a student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the local team was Cleveland Browns, a perpetually bad team, which is still part of NFL. I was used to bad teams getting out of the league and replaced by one, two or three teams from the lower league (depending on sport). Spelling was not a big issue for me because at the time my English was not good enough that I knew the difference.

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      1. Agreed, hand-egg is much more appropriate than football. Hmm It’s interesting that they are still part of the NFL, I wonder why they weren’t replaced. Oh I see, for me spelling is a bit of an issue since I write with the American spellings for my books but the English spellings in general so sometimes I get tripped up.

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    3. It’s the way NFL works. They don’t replace their bottom teams. It’s static, or almost static. Not that I want them to. Dallas Cowboys, the team I am rooting for are pretty close to the bottom right now. They seem to be the new Cleveland Browns. I can see how British vs. American English can trip you up. You probably perfected your English as British English and then you write a lot for an American and Canadian audience. In my case my English was so bad when I came to the US, that it was the US spelling that stayed with me in the long run.

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      1. I’ve heard of the Dallas Cowboys, it’s a shame they’re not doing better.
        Yes, I went to a school that had the British education system so I learnt the British spellings and meanings of everything and then I had to learn the other spellings for my writing which ends up confusing me at times. Oh I see, since English wasn’t your first language I guess you never really needed to be that good at it till you moved to the US.

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    4. Yes, you are right. When I and another student arrived in the US we stayed for one week with a very hospitable family. When we were leaving, we gave them a dog statue that was the breed of their dog. As I handed it over, I said, “we are giving this present to express our greatness”. I had practiced that. Afterwards, I realized that is was not supposed to be greatness but gratefulness.

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    5. Thank you Pooja. I did a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I remember sitting in a group at the student dorm and we were talking. I said something and everyone was just staring at me shocked. Then a girl said I’ll bet you meant this….. and I said yes, I thought that’s what I said, and everyone started laughing. I still don’t know what they thought I said at first.

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      1. Yeah, that happens because honestly English is kind of confusing. Multiple things can mean the same thing and one thing can mean so many different things. When it’s not your first language it’s hard to know exactly how to express what you mean because you often just translate from your first language to English.

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    6. And I am facing it again learning French. I find myself translating from both Swedish and English to French. English is more similar to French than Swedish but it is more natural for me to translate from Swedish to French. My teacher says that my accent is very Swedish, not English/American. It is totally different from that of the other students. One thing that happened early on during my French classes was that sometimes I couldn’t find the French words and I felt stressed and I had to speak English, but sometimes it wasn’t English that came out but Swedish, and I didn’t realize it. The others were just staring at me. My wife elbowed me and said “Thomas, you are speaking Swedish again”. It is funny how that happened when I felt stressed out. I thought that my English was just as fundamental to me as Swedish, but it is not. The native language you learned as a kid will always be your most fundamental language.

      It reminded me of something they said at a show at Universal Studios in Florida. They wanted volunteers for a show but the task could be a bit freaky if something went wrong. They said they only wanted native English speakers, which sounded discriminatory to me. However, they explained that even though your English may be perfect, when people panic, they panic in their native language. I literally discovered that in French class.

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      1. Yeah, I think it’s one of those things that don’t seem real until it happens to you. Has your French gotten better now? Was Swedish the only language you used to be fluent in till you began learning English?

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    8. It’s going slow when you are just taking two hour class per week. I am not embedded in French and that makes it much slower. However, my French has slowly been progressing. At the beginning it was like Chinese to me. But I passed the DELF B1 exam in December almost a year ago. The DELF A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 exams is an international standard for all languages. They are standardized tests. It is a jury in the country where you are (the US in my case) as well as officials in the country for the language (France), which together decide whether you pass. To become a French citizen you need to pass B1 French, which is very strict compared to the US.

      B1 means that you are able participate in a conversation, read and understand a short newspaper article, understand most of three two minute radio broadcasts and write a short essay on a given surprise topic (160+ words) correctly using half a dozen present, future, past, conditional or subjunctive tenses of your choice in less than one hour. Basically, you are not fluent but independent, you can get around, work, go to school, listen to news, vote. I am working towards B2 now, which means advanced independent. It is close to fluent. For example, you have to hold a 20 minute presentation on a topic they give you on the spot and be able to answer the questions you get. For C1 and C2 you have speak/understand like a native speaker, well ignoring the accent, but I am not aiming for that. I’ll stop at B2.

      Anyway, I am droning on, yes Swedish was the only language I was fluent in before I learned English. However, Norwegian is so close to Swedish or Norrlandish / north Swedish that I understand everything I read or hear in Norwegian. It is not easy for me to learn languages. We had an Indian woman in French class who learned French very quickly. She was also fluent in English, Hindi, the language in Bangalore Karnataka, and Spanish. She was amazing, but she had to quit because she got a baby.

      I remember you saying that English was your first language. Are you learning any Indian languages?

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      1. That’s really impressive, it seems like you’re doing well even though you’re learning it slowly. I remember having to do that a 20 minute presentation for my French exam in high school, it was awful. Because I was really bad at French, not because the exam was awful.

        Some people are just so good at languages. I have a friend who picks up languages so quickly. I envy that because I was never particularly good at learning languages I wasn’t already somewhat familiar with. It’s interesting that you bring up Bangalore Karnataka because I was just chatting with a friend of mine that told me she was trying to learn it since that’s what her mother’s side of the family speaks primarily and she feels very lost.

        I know Hindi and Gujarati but I had always wanted to learn Sanskrit but never did. My mum is fluent in it and offered to teach me but I never had enough time. Maybe someday.

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    9. Well, I think you are doing better than me knowing English, Hindi and Gujarati and studied French. In my last comment I forgot what the language in Karnataka was and it is Kannada. Deepa in the French class was amazing. The rest of us were struggling. It was too bad she had to quit, but she may rejoin the class after she has found a babysitter. She has missed a good chunk of the B2 class, which would be a problem for me, but not for her. It would be cool if you learned Sanskrit too but that is a lot of languages to learn and I’ve heard it is a difficult ancient language to learn.

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      1. Thanks, I only know the languages I learnt as a kid though. I’ve forgotten most of the French I had picked up. Hopefully, she can rejoin since it seems like she was really thriving.
        Yeah, most Indian languages originated from Sanskrit. It’ll definitely be a challenge but maybe someday I’ll learn it successfully. For now, I only know a couple of words.

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    11. In Swedish highschool we studied the religions (christianity, hinduism, islam, judaism, buddhism, jaimism, shinto, animism, spiritism, agnosticism, atheism, etc.) without favoring one, and geography and world history were important subjects, so that included India and Sanskrit. I realized from my kids schooling that it was quite different here. Swedish is based on the old norse language (of the vikings) but has been significantly influenced by German.

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      1. That’s interesting, you’re lucky you learnt so much in high school. In my high school, we followed the British curriculum so we only learnt history and religion for really specific European countries. Nothing about the world. I only learnt about a lot of that when I got to university.

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    12. That’s a bit of a bummer. I should say though that not all Swedish high schools were the same. I went to the Natural Science Highschool, which prepared students for the University, specifically STEM fields, and they added a lot of world history, geography, philosophy, into the curriculum as well. It was very well rounded. The people who went to vocational high schools such as welding, electronics, and textile design, did not get the same education. It is also matters Sweden is a small country with a small language, so we really need to pay attention to the rest of the world.

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    1. Ha ha, I bet. I remember when our Labrador Baylor ran off with the Thanksgiving turkey. We had only one turkey. At first we considered serving it but cutting off the pieces that Baylor had chewed on and slobbered all over, but we decided that was too much detective work, so we had a turkey-less Thanksgiving that year.

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  14. Before our second child, my wife would often buy two turkeys at Thanksgiving time. One for Thanksgiving itself and than she’d save one for Christmas. It turns out our second child has a mild poultry allergy. Turkey and chicken make her eczema flare and itch. So we tend to do either ham or a beef roast for Thanksgiving.

    This year, I have work Thanksgiving night at the observatory, so I’ll have turkey on the mountain with my co-workers.

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  16. Online deliveries can create quite the chaos when the delivery time gets mixed up. But it was unprofessional of them to create so much confusion. Turkey isn’t popular in India either. I have rarely seen in on restaurant menus too. Looks like the William Sonoma turkey lived up to its meaning in Swedish!

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    1. Yes you are right Shweta. On-line food delivery is quite risky when you need it for a specific date. Well it is true for anything you need by a specific date, I guess, but you can’t return a turkey dinner like a can with other goods. Ha ha you are right about turkey and the Swedish second meaning of it.

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  17. Ha, what an unholy mess! It sounds like their ‘deliver for Thanksgiving’ option is a bit fundamentally flawed? Glad it all worked out in the end though. Love the secondary meaning for turkey in Swedish, very apt. Like you I come from a country that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving but have had a few experiences of it as my former sister-in-law was a Texan girl who brought the celebration alive in Amsterdam. A belated Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.

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    1. Yes the new delivery date of November 29 wasn’t impressive, and they didn’t even tell us. Luckily it wasn’t too terrible in the end. I remember the stories about you living in Amsterdam. About your sister in law, it reminds me of when my wife and I moved to Sweden from Ohio. For me it was back to Sweden for her it was moving to Sweden. We stayed for one and a half year. We celebrated Thanksgiving with some American collegues at ABB Robotics. We brought it to Sweden.

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  18. That’s a lot of turkeys, Thomas. We also ordered Thanksgiving Dinner online this year. My dad wanted to snazz up an order with appetizers, sides, and desserts. Fortunately, I had it all arrive early and everything worked out. No Turkeys of the “fiasco” variety. I’m glad you enjoyed your Thanksgiving. Happy December.

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    1. Luckily it turned out not be as bad as it first looked like. The turkeys arrived on time just as a friend was over and she took one of them off our hands. For thanksgiving we ate one and the third one we’ll put in the freezer for later. I wish you a Happy December as well.

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  19. I’m so glad that after all that, you still had a good Thanksgiving.

    Side Note: I have a question about the Leonberger. I’ve been watching the Thanksgiving dog show on TV and so far, I’ve seen the toy category, and the worker category. Do you know if the Leonberger is shown? And if so, would it likely be in the large dog category? I’m just curious.

    Happy Tuesday!

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    1. Thank you so much Kymber. I have to admit I don’t know about the Thanksgiving dog show but the Leonberger would be in the large dog category, like the Saint Bernard. I have watched dog shows on TV and I have seen Leonbergers in some of the dog shows. However, since it is a rare breed they are not always there.

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  22. Wow, that was a Thanksgiving ordering rollercoaster! I can’t believe the confusion with the delivery dates. But hey, at least you ended up with a delicious turkey (and another for a lucky friend!). Maybe next year you’ll stick with the traditional grocery store approach, but this story is definitely a Thanksgiving dinner conversation starter! Happy Thanksgiving!”

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    1. Thank you so much Munaeem Jamal. When I first posted this it was terrible but then it got better. But, like you say, I think we stay with the traditional approach of shopping next time. With ordering food online, or at least this kind of food, there’s too much that can go wrong.

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