Living in Canada I feel we don't really have much to choose from as far as stores to have a wedding registry (especially compared to the US - Macy's, Bloomindales, Target..the list is much longer). Sure, there are online registries, honeymoon registries, and the like - but we really wanted to register for some more traditional items….which left us with:
The Bay (Home Outfitters is an option for this company as well)
Sears
Linens and Things (which is currently going bankrupt and closing…so I hear)
Canadian Tire (which has stopped it's gift registry a few months before our actual wedding day…plus the store didn't really fit our wants/needs).
Wal-Mart (no offence, but, no thanks)
Looking at the above options, we really only felt that The Bay or Sears were contenders. We thought of Sears because it is everywhere our family lives…although didn't seem to offer fine china, fancy crystal - and many other items to the same degree. And I'm happy we didn't go with them. My husband's cousin used Sears and when we went in to try to purchase a gift for them they didn't have any of the items we wanted to purchase (and there were many!). Yes, you can order online…which we tried to do…but we needed their exact mailing address, phone number and WE had to know the store location that was closest to them. They live in Vancouver, so there are a few Sears stores in that city ;)
This left us with The Bay. We liked They Bay because it offered tons of fine china to choose from and varying price points (we went with Mikasa Cameo Platinum - pretty but simple). As well as tons of linens, towels, gadgets, kitchen appliances…you name it. It also allowed us to use any gift cards we received at their 3 stores: The Bay, Home Outfitters and Zellers. We did also register at Home Outfitters as well, but only because they offered us a $50 gift card to do so - hold out for those free gifts before registering :) We closed the registry soon after though…we really wanted our china (ok, I really wanted our china) from The Bay.
I know this will depend on which Bay store you shop at, but the customer service at the store we used was terrible. It was ok at first, but it seemed that once gifts were getting purchased off the registry, the service went downhill. There didn't seem to be staff available in the registry area to answer our questions. It also seemed like they were very unorganized in terms of which gifts in their "back room" were ours. And each time staff went into the "back room" we were waiting a good 10 minutes. This was particularly frustrating when it came to our wedding china. FOUR months after our wedding day we are STILL waiting for a couple of pieces of our china. We only just received the majority of pieces about a month ago. Many of these pieces were purchased weeks before the wedding and still hadn't arrived. Not only have the items been late in arriving, but the staff couldn't even gift us an estimate of when they might arrive. Not cool.
We also received some of the wrong items and when we called the staff on it, they tried to convince us that they were what we registered for, until we walked over to the piece we registered for, showed the registry print out saying that they were incorrect. No apologies followed.
We also received a clearly broken item. It wasn't wrapped, so the staff could see the defect as clearly as I could…she still tried to get us to leave with it.
Some of our items were discontinued (and they weren't seasonal) after they were purchased. We weren't informed of this (nor was it indicated on our registry).
We also haven't received an invitation to a completion party, and several have happened since we were married….oh, I guess I should correct that. We did receive a notice in the mail yesterday letting us know we could attend one that same afternoon - a little short notice!
Let's just say, there were several "problems" with this company. We love our gifts though…and are incredibly happy for that. The Bay that we dealt with just needs to get their act together!