Burlington Coat Factory leaves customers out in the cold

No warning and little explanation for planned 28-hour site outage

At least they aren't making any excuses.

From a story on StorefrontBacktalk:

Leaving online shoppers out in the cold with no warnings or explanations (or coats, if that's what they wanted to buy), Burlington Coat Factory took its Web site offline all day Wednesday (Nov. 18)-plus at least four hours-for a planned outage as the $3.5 billion clothing retailer performed an extensive hardware and database upgrade.

In what a senior company official conceded was an oversight, the 430-store, New Jersey-based chain failed to publish any ahead-of-time advisories before yanking its E-Commerce site's plug in the wee hours. Nor did it post much in the way of an explanatory statement during the long downtime period that followed.

A company executive concedes: "The messaging on the site could clearly have been better."

In fact, as the story notes, the entire operation could have been better.