A couple weeks ago, I got an email message from the Lord & Taylor department store asking me to review the slippers I had recently purchased. Of course, I had not purchased the slippers.

It did not appear to be spam. I use quite a few different email addresses and the message was addressed to the correct address on my Lord & Taylor account. Beats me what happened here, as I had not made an on-line purchase from Lord & Taylor for roughly five years.

So, I log on to my account at www.lordandtaylor.com only to find out that it is inactive, which makes the email message even stranger.

I activated the account, only to see that the purchase history shows none of my old orders. I can't even guess at the mistake(s) that resulted in their thinking that I had purchased slippers.

For good luck, I changed the email address on the account.

Now that my account is active, I am getting spammed by the store. They send an email message every day. At this point you might have guessed, the daily spam emails are sent to the old email address, not the new one. I double checked a few days later, the new email address is indeed associated with my account.

Reviewing my account, under Email Preferences it says "You are currently not subscribed to receive any email newsletters."

Wow, are they screwed up.

On a related note, a Google search for Lord & Taylor returns a link to their Fifth Avenue store in New York City, which just closed down this week. Clicking the link resulted in the error shown below.

Pretty cruel considering the store dated back to 1914 and was the first department store on Fifth Avenue. It's as if it never existed.