How NOT to design a website and attract customers

These guys make the smartass Borders employees look like Ray "The customer is always right" Kroc.  I give you the website that won't let you see their products until after you've "joined": OneKingsLane.com.

I found them when their ad popped up on Facebook:

I liked the piece of furniture in their ad, so I decided to take a look.  And got this:

Apparently they require you, the prospective customer, to provide your pertinent information and join before they'll let you view a single item.  I tried escape, clicking on other parts of the page, but nothing would make the signup box go away so I could browse.  So I decided to get sneaky and just type in their address rather than going through the FB referral page, like so:

This gave me the option of logging in through Facebook without actually "joining", so I tried that.  And got this:

That's right.  They want access to my Facebook account.  This before I've had the opportunity to look at a single item on their site to see if I'm even interested in any of their products besides the one that is in their FB ad.

You know what this spells?  F-A-I-L.  Customer Service Fail at that.

I don't know who at One Kings Lane thinks this is clever, acceptable or worst of all actually makes some kind of sense, but whoever it is should be fired immediately and never employed again ever, ever, EVER.  I've done a lot of online shopping during my many years on Al Gore's interwebz and have never seen anything like this, and there happens to be a good reason for it: it's insulting to prospective customers and is possibly one of the stupidest things in the history of doing business, especially in an age where online privacy concerns are huge.

At least the Borders employees waited to burn their bridges until after they knew the end was imminent.