Im a bit peeved....

And it wasnt even my money!

My friend Jess ( over at Anchor's Away blog) went to Build-a-Bear with her husband and 3 young children, to build bears from daddy, prior to deployment. She spent an arm and a leg on 3 bears, the clothing and the pre-recordable voicebox for each bear. While checking out, one of the voice boxes died. They had her husband re-record on a new box and put it in the bear.

Not even 2 days into this deployment, another bear voicebox has died. The Bear surgeon at B-a-B thinks the voice message can be saved, that the "battery" died, and they removed the voicebox from the bear, and shipped it off to be "saved". It should be back in 6-8 wks.

In the event that it can't be saved it was suggested they could send a voicebox to daddy and he could re-record and send it back to be inserted into the bear. The issue is... daddy is not on vacation. He isnt on a large ship that has mail service for boxes to and from the ship. They get mail drops. A helicopter comes to the ship and drops the mail on the helo pad once a week or so. Mail does go out, but generally speaking it goes out when they port. Daddy could potentially beat the voicebox back to the states, given the up to 2 months to try and save the first one and who knows how long if they tried to ship one to him and have him send it back....


5 YEARS ago, another friend of mine went through this same ritual with Build-a-Bear. Her husband was fixin' to deploy and they took their 3 little ones in for the same reason.... making bears with daddy's voice. They had a horrible time, with 2 of the 3 bears, and lost the voicebox long before the deployment was over.

My biggest disappointment in this company is not that their items occasionally falter. Its that this is obviously a KNOWN issue over the past 5 yrs (just ask around the military community, its happened to a lot of people with deployed loved ones.)

Knowing that the get a good deal of business from families in these circumstances, and that the issue dates back to at least 2006 if not further back... one would think they would look into better materials (even at a higher cost to the consumer). When you want something a certain way, and you pay for it to be that way, it should last more than a couple days.