Jewelry Television (JTV) review: Make jewelry television great again!

I have been a JTV customer for about 25 years.

Over the past five years, their customer service has gone downhill. I shared a transcript of two of their male chat representatives being very, very rude and condescending about two years ago. It was about as cut-and-dried unprofessional as it gets yet nobody apologized.

I spent a lot of money with them and even stated the dollar value (double digits) and they still didn’t care enough to have management actually investigate the issue. (I tried by email and phone to flag the situation but they kept on hiding behind their web team is different than their phone team, which is different than their back end. Apparently that was MY problem as a customer.)

That same year, I placed a phone order and a U.S. based supervisor was also very rude to me, basically telling me I was lying about getting 3/4 sizes by phone in the past for ring orders. (I had, in fact, had this size done but she insisted I was wrong even though I had the order numbers and emails to prove that this accommodation had been made in the past.)

At another point, I returned a piece of jewelry (morganite) that had developed this weird hazing on the back of the stone that would not come off for repair and didn’t get it back for more than two months. (Item was still in stock that whole time.)

In another order, about a year back, I never received the item. Three weeks later JTV had sold my item (last one in stock) to someone else. They cancelled my order with no apology for the inconvenience. I later found that same item was in stock, new, but on the auction website. I won the auction for less than the price I paid. They cancelled that order. Then it appeared on Auction again. That time I paid more. And wouldn’t you know? They were able to ship that one. When I contacted “customer care” by email no one apologized or matched the lowest price I had obtained for my trouble.

The company now has Indian executives, and per some other complaints they do not use U.S. call staff anymore. I can’t vouch for whether the offshoring of the call center is true as I personally have not ordered from their call center in over a year.

The following is not a slam on the very intelligent people of India but merely a statement of fact, whether IBM or any other company (historically the tech industry) that begins hiring Indian labor: Any company that ends up with Indian executives or offshoring to India eventually only ever hires Indian and will outsource more and more to India. This is the formula for their H1-B visa and/or chain migration success in the U.S. (I’m not going to knock them for being smart. That’s on Americans for not realizing that it is a time-tested formula now going back to the late 1990s.)

I already deal with offshore call centers whether trying to schedule medical imaging, trying to report dangerous electricity conditions in my fire-prone area of California and on a whole range of issues. I’m absolutely fed up and never thought I would say this but now when I get those thick accents I just hang up. It’s not worth the risk of having a brain bleed dealing with the way they run people in circles vs. resolve issues. (I have an unruptured aneurysm, so this is a literal concern not figurative.)

My patience has worn thin because I’m getting this from all sides: I have had double charges appear from big box retailers that have to be resolved by my bank because one absolutely cannot trust offshore call centers to act on issues, even urgent. When I called my electric utility to report arcing on my power pole they refused to send anyone out. They know they are immune from accountability. When I call my doctor’s office and can’t get through for 20 minutes and then when I do the call center is offshore, I hang up. I do not receive timely medical care because of these corporate decisions and not just because I have run out of patience. The last STAT order a doctor called in was rescheduled repeatedly by the company that received the order. I spent two weeks and four hours on the phone before the issue was resolved for my medical “emergency”.

Buying jewelry should be an escape, not a reminder of how horribly cheap corporate America has become. But now it’s not an escape. It’s a middle finger. Indians hate dealing with Americans. They are intentionally obtuse, drop calls when one asks for a supervisor and make zero attempt to hide their indifference. (And that’s even if one attempts to sweet talk them, NOT because of any rude or unbecoming behavior. That said, I’m a female. Not listening to women is cultural in much of the world.)

But let’s talk about what JTV exists to sell in the first place: They have competitors that offer beautiful jewelry (e.g. Ross-Simmons) aimed at middle class consumers. JTV, by contrast, has adopted the approach so many sellers out of India do on eBay, which is to embrace quantity over quality. Apart from Park Avenue and Charles Winston, the designs do not live up. Apart from the basic solitaire bridal ring, their Prazana line reserved for some of their clunkiest, overly busy, sharp-pronged, masculine looking designs anyone in an Indian sweat shop could come up with. They rarely sell gemstones of note anymore (no, JTV, color treated Topaz doesn’t count).

Somehow Ross-Simmons is faced with the same economic conditions when it comes to the price of precious metal, yet JTV can’t take a clue. (How many times does a customer have to say “It’s the design, not the cost?”)

JTV’s problem isn’t labor and material costs. It’s the fact that 75 percent of the inventory junk, with what little people want selling out on TV and attached to long wait lists.

Pre-owned is one of the biggest scams yet. Those items always cost more than they did new.

They’re trying to sell more brass plated jewelry, blaming the price of silver. (They dumped their Bella Luce line in silver and have replaced it with brass.) Much of what they sell never appears on TV because they don’t actually have it in stock. For years now, they have padded their web inventory with catalog content from third party websites (e.g. Jewelry Web). A large chunk of the lab diamond inventory is gold over silver but after all these years, they still don’t offer a gold replacing service.

To make up for their slipping sales they are selling cologne and a bunch of other stuff like they did years ago as ACN (America’s Collectible Network).

I am surprised any of the original hosts still work there but the few who do, seem overworked. (They don’t appear to get hardly any time off. Sad.)

And that brings me to the TV channel: The women all are slim and put together but their longtime male hosts, with the exception of the gay guy, are lacking in the male grooming department. (They’re nice, but seriously guys. You’re on TV! Don’t just slick your hair back and call it a day. Clean up the haircuts, use some hair remover on your hands and get rid of the beer bellies!)

I was never much on home shopping and to this day almost never tune into HSN or QVC. JTV was the only shopping network I did watch. I feel bad for the hosts, who are attempting to sell the few pieces that are worth the air time when so much of their web inventory looks like swap meet material.

I wish JTV management would take this feedback to heart but they’re trapped by their executive hiring decisions and most certainly will put the expectations of their non-American executives/partners above their bread-and-butter (customers). Nevertheless, my feedback can be summed up as follows: 1) Stop emphasizing quantity from India and start emphasizing quality of design. 2) Do not offshore your call centers, unless making your customers feel like shopping with JTV is about as pleasant as a visit to the DMV is the point; 3) Male show hosts should be held to the same grooming and personal appearance standards as the women, 4) Female hosts are about 4x as dark as the average beach-going Californian from Easter through Labor Day. Gals, I love y’all but please go easier on the spray tan!