Wayfair, you’ve got just what I need. Not to mention what I don’t need.

A few years back, when I was reno-ing my condo, I pretty much haunted Wayfair, and ended up getting a mirror, a mirrored medicine cabinet, and any number of bathroom and kitchen thingies. A few months ago, I had a kitchen shelf collapse and ended up losing three of my favorite bowls. I wasn’t able to exactly replicate them – which was too bad, because I really liked all these bowls – but I was able to find replacements on Wayfair.

Really, they do have pretty much just what you need.

Why, just now, I was looking for a pillow for one of my LR chairs, and found myself grazing.

There is one problem with Wayfair, and that there are too damned many things to choose from out there. I mean, I did try to limit my pillow search to blue or orange lumbar, and there were still 200 pages x 48 items per page serve up to me.

Did I really want to look at 9,600 pillows? Especially when I wanted a lumbar pillow that was shorter than the standard size (and sorting by size wasn’t one of the options). Fortunately, I was able to find something that fit my bill on page 11. Unfortunately, I had to buy two, so if anyone wants a blue and white patterned 16.5” long lumbar pillow, just let me know.

Anyway, I do like Wayfair, even though it can be overwhelming. (9,000 blue and/or orange lumbar pillows to choose from?????)

While I was virtually traipsing around Wayfair, what I did not get was a phone call from Wayfair.  But that has been known to happen.

On Halloween night, the comedy writer Ariel Dumas received a hair-raising phone call. Dumas had been browsing Wayfair online when her phone rang with an unfamiliar number. It was a Massachusetts area code, so she picked it up, on the longshot chance it might be Senator Elizabeth Warren, who often calls her supporters at random.

Nope.

“It was a Wayfair employee saying they noticed I was browsing their website,” she later told her 56,000 followers, in a tweet that quickly took off online. “[S]o happy creepy Halloween I guess.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Well, I probably wouldn’t have picked up the call to begin with – even if it might have been Elizabeth Warren giving me a holler. Too many spam calls already coming from the 617 area code, many using the first three digits of my phone number as well. Since Wayfair HQ is about a 10 minute walk from where I live, they may well have presented a familiar number to me. Still, I’m pretty much at the point where unless the number’s in my contact list, I’m not picking it up.

If it’s important, they can leave a voice mail. (Even if it’s not, they can leave a voice mail. And I get plenty of voice mails in Chinese. So I definitely know which calls to block.)

As it happened, I didn’t get a call from Wayfair offering help with my pillow purchase.

Wayfair spokeswoman Susan Frechette said the company recently introduced a new customer service team that monitors shoppers’ online browsing habits and then steps in to offer assistance as a way to close a sale.

“To best serve our customers and help them find what they are looking for, Wayfair has a team of specialists that follows up by phone with customers who have already made a purchase,” Frechette wrote via e-mail. That team “follows up on previous orders and past site activity that indicates strong interest in a particular product category.”

Maybe the size of the purchase was too low-end to merit a call. Which makes me just as happy. I’ll have to be on the lookout when I start looking for a rug for my den that’s not as cheeseball as the flokati that’s in there now.

Frechette said the calls were not based on real-time browsing and noted that customers get an e-mail from Wayfair offering assistance before anyone places a call.

This didn’t seem to be the experience that Ariel Dumas reported. But she is, after all, a comedian, and it’s certainly a lot funnier (peculiar, not haha) getting a weirdo call based on your real-time browsing than it is getting a weirdo call that’s part of a multi-channel support chain (email, phone).

Of course the process outlined by Frechette doesn’t say that they don’t follow an e-mail up with an unsolicited call. And Dumas may well have gotten (and ignored) an email, as she may not have been checking email while she was absorbed by her meander through the virtual (and virtually unlimited) aisles of Wayfair.

Meanwhile, a suggestion for Wayfair: why not have pop up a chat – human or chatbot – asking if someone looking around would like to chat virtually or on phone? Wouldn’t that make more sense?

Anyway, Dumas got a lot comments on her tweet, one from “a former Wayfair employee [who] said that the practice ‘happens a lot’.”

“Many customers find this helpful especially when shopping categories that include mattresses, flooring, plumbing, upholstery and other high consideration products where specialized expertise is particularly helpful,” [Wayfair spokeswoman Susan Frechette] wrote.

I guess a lumbar pillow isn’t one of them thar “high consideration products”, even though Wayfair offers 9,600 of them. Which takes an awful lot of consideration on the shopper’s part. Just sayin’.

And, of course, now Wayfair knows just which lumbar pillows I was considering, even if I didn’t buy them. Just what are they going to do with that?

Even if I don’t get a phone call, should I now look forward to Wayfair pillow ads popping up for the next month or so. And then there’s Amazon, because while I was roaming around Wayfair, Amazon popped up with a suggested purchase of a couple of lumbar pillows that looked identical, but were a different brand and size than the ones I wanted. But which were half the price.

Spies sure are everywhere.

My bottom line is that I’m mostly in agreement with the jingle “Wayfair, you’ve got just what I need.” But if you’re thinking about calling me up at any point, well, include me out.