DAFUQ : The Herbal City Review

Wow. I mean, really. There is laziness, there is ignorance, and then there is just plain insulting. Any one of them, even the last one, could be forgivable in under the right circumstances, and usually, thankfully, you really only have to put up with one at a time. Today’s offering, however, Herbal City, is nothing short of a spectacular clusterfuck that seemed to be built by thumbing through “How To Build An Effective Website” and then doing the exact opposite. The thing is, however, while there is an element of laziness seen with Herbal City, it is obvious that there was some effort put into crafting this site, just in the completely wrong places. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the whole site was one giant troll. There is no way someone could accidentally stray so far from aesthetic sanity, thinking that the garbled mess of clip art and wall o’ text actually looked good. Then again, this is the internet we’re talking about.

When you first land on the Herbal City it looks simple and somewhat spartan, despite the terrible hippy clipart adorning the top of the page. It has an assortment of links for the various product categories, some of which are quite unique (never again search for supplies of “Spiritual Dust”, Bob Marley iPhone cases, or “alternate mood hedelpers”, whatever those are). Clicking on any of those links, however, sends you spiraling into a tacky hell of photoshopped stock photos and constant pandering. Start at say, Island Smoke, and prepare to be horrified. Now I don’t like hippies normally (I find the term rather derisive, actually) but this stuff is pure schlock. There are more half naked girls copy/pasted over hastily snapped product art then I’ve ever seen anywhere, even at the Herbal Smoke Shop. Funnily enough, a lot of their stock is the same sort of fake weed buds that actually kinda looks like weed crap that the Herbal Smoke Shop carries. The rest of the items presented by the giant wall of text and insultingly bad product art are equally shady and mass produced, and of course usually only available in larger quantities. In fact, despite having a phone number, the only calls they state they will take are  from people placing orders of 100 bucks or more.

The rest of their policies are A) written in some strange combination of broken 1st person English and random unicode and B) nonsensical. Take, for example, Term and Condition number 6. The first one, I mean, as there are two number sixes (and no 4 or 5, 8 either for that matter):

6. Sale rep e-mail “Hey, it we are out a few days ago, give it about another week, if you don’t get it, is send it again and send you some really cool new stuff see if you like it. If you get a send shipment buy chance your lucky, share with your friends you have my card. Thanks.

What the this…I don’t even…

Um…what? Near as I can tell, that’s a sample email meant to imply that if you send them a question about your order, they’ll be chill about it and maybe send you some free stuff and replace your order for free and stuff if it doesn’t get there in the 7-14 or more days Herbal City says it will take you to get your stuff from them. Why so long? Well, say hello to our old friend, the manual credit card system. Unlike other sites we’ve reviewed which try to hide the fact that they capture and manually input your credit card info, Herbal City makes no bones about the fact that they take your CC info and manually punch it in to whatever machine they have lying around whatever shop or storage facility or Federal prison cell this company is operating from.

I could go on, but honestly it’s just too painful to continue to look at this bullshit. Steer far clear of this hogwash.