Quick to make a sale but no delivery

I was very disappointed when I was informed that the fridge we paid cash for was not in stock after we had to call the store multiple times to find out when they delivering.

We visited the Silverton Fountain store in pretoria on Sunday 15th December and payed cash for a fridge that they said they have stock of at their warehouse. We asked about delivery and they assured us that delivery can even happen on Monday 16th Dec even though it's a public holiday.

Tuesday the 17th when we noticed their is no communication regarding delivery, we decided to call the store. We were unable to get hold of them multiple times and when we did get hold of them, they said they would call back and never did. When I got hold of them on Wednesday the 18th, I was told that the system showed there was stock at the warehouse when we made payment, but when they tried to allocate the payment/order, it showed no stock.

No one called to inform us there is no stock. If we had not called to follow up, we would probably still be waiting. The store has two numbers, one doesn't ring and the other always says line busy.

I had to visit the store Wednesday to look at other options, I was offered a smaller fridge for R200 less then what we paid but what they were offering was 54 litters smaller then what we original paid for. Another offer was made for a fridge that I would have to pay R400 extra for, different brand and color, but management did not agree to give it to me for the price we already paid because I refused to pay anything extra.

I insisted on being offered something similar in size as the one we originally paid for, and for the same price or to be given a refund.

After being at the store for about an hour on Wednesday, they eventually "found" the fridge we wanted at another store and I was told we can expect delivery on Thursday 19th December. Thursday Afternoon I called again to make sure they delivering, I was then told delivery can't happen, they will deliver on Friday.

As I post this, we have not received our fridge. We could not get through to the store at all yesterday (Friday 20th) and there has been no attempt to contact us either.

We had to go to the store this morning to request our refund. There was a new person standing in for someone who didn't know anything about our order so we had to explain everything again. The person who initially did the sale pretended as if he does not know us even though we were there multiple times. We were told they don't have enough cash on hand to refund us, so we sat in the store for 1hr30mins+ to wait for money so we can be paid back. We had to resort to being paid back majority of the money for now and having the balance owed to us added to our layby that we also took out at their store on the 15th. We plan to cancel our layby as we could never see ourselves buying from Fair Price again after what we experienced.

Instead of getting rid of my festive anxiety, they have added to it for sure!