Buying Furniture: Update 2

The Issue: A missing bed frame...

So we have given these people a week to fix this problem and I just made my husband call the store. According to the "manager" our bed will not arrive until Jan 31st! What the heck? And someone couldn't call us to tell us this? My husband told them of course this was unacceptable because now we are going to pay for furniture we have not received and have no bed for a month and a half. Well they don't see how they can do anything since the frame is coming from China on a boat. My husband is also a manager, and informs this person that they do whatever it takes to make things right for the customer and that is what they need to do, so he better put it on a plane or something, even if they have to pay four times what it is worth to make it right they better do it to which the man offers us a frame until the real one arrives, which slightly fixes the problem but not really. So my husband calls the corporate offices and leaves messages, but it seems they have probably gone home for the weekend. So I was trying to be nice by not mentioning the name of the company, but I am over it. If anyone lives in the Louisville area, be warned of Furniture Liquidators. The furniture we got was nice and decent priced but here are a couple of things that are a little shady. One I don't recall seeing their return policy anywhere but you get one on your receipt which of course you don't get until after you pay. Their policy is since they supposedly make so little on commissions that they only offer in store credit. What that has to do with anything I have no idea, you would think the more they made on commissions the harder it would be to recoup the money and they would really be taking a loss. Two the prices on the furniture are not always the prices in the computer. We paid for it and the next day we were going over the receipt and saw we had paid too much on a couple of things. I went back and they told me that I didn't have to do that I could have just called or they would have caught it when they were delivering it and gave us in store credit for the difference. Well there is a tactic right there for getting people back in if I ever heard one because who is going to let that money go to waste? Smart, but still shady. We waited up a long time last Friday night waiting for the man who was supposed to be the manager who said he was bringing the bed before 9pm and we ended up sleeping on the couch. I had to call them on Saturday for him to say he just tried calling two phones and got no answer (although neither had rang on my end) because he was in the warehouse that morning and saw the crack...? Wait a second... didn't you say you were delivering last night, and you rented a truck and was delivering to everyone but us? Not their fault it was broken most likely, but shouldn't you have called us when you found out you wouldn't be getting one until the end of January?? So the ball has been dropped and so far there is nothing we can do because we can only get in store credit which doesn't really hurt them does it, and now we have $119 of credit which they give the customer no real record of it is in their computers. I already told you about the computers...

The Point: Be careful when shopping at Furniture Liquidators.

Buying Furniture: Update

The Issue: A missing bed frame...

I called the man who didn't deliver last night, and according to him he had just attempted to call my house and my cell phone with no answers. Bull, because neither rung and although I can believe one screwing up but I can not believe both had. Supposedly the headboard is cracked and he won't give me busted furniture. Okay, that is fair, I don't want busted furniture. Well he wanted to give me a mattress set. Hello, as previously mentioned, I have a mattress set. So now he wants to give me $100 in store credit. So I agree to that for some reason, and agree to take the queen apart, which is still in my house, and set our mattress on the floor. He also doesn't know when this is going to resolve itself since it is the holidays. Yippee, buy $4,000 worth of furniture and still living like a bunch of college students.

By the way, we had thrown away the old sheets and frame and the trash people got it before we knew all this was going to happen. So the mattress is bare too because I am not putting my $400 bedroom set on the floor.

The Point: We had to sleep on the couch after buying $4,000 of furniture.

Cashing Checks

The Issue: When did you cash that check?...

I gave my daughter's teacher a check issued in the teacher's name like she asked me to for books that we had ordered from one of those order forms. She said this way she can write one big check and we will get our books faster. Okay, sounds good. So the check was dated 10/5/07, and my account indicates it was cashed 12/20/07. WOW did that screw up my fiancees for the holiday season. I know had I been keeping an accurate record I probably wouldn't of had this problem. I never write checks. That is why. Also when I opened the account two years ago the bank "gave" me a (charged me for) box of non duplicate checks and since I do not use them there was no point ordering more. I still have two books of the things still in the box. I had been looking for the checks I had written because they were like scatter cashed, and I thought they all had finally been cashed since I had voided a few. Well I was wrong. So she cashed it, and I bought something that caused me to go $0.63 under. So I got charged $25.00. Now I am -$25.63. I also had taken my daughter to Burger King like I promised for $9.99, so now -$35.62. My husband of course was like well you should have kept better track, and I know this, but I don't think even he who still writes checks for all the bills would have remembered there was a check out there from 2 and a half months ago.

The Point: If you receive a check make sure you cash it in a reasonable amount of time, don't wait until two and a half months later.

Buying Furniture

The Issue: If you are delivering furniture make sure you get the bed right...

My husband and I went out and bought 3 rooms of furniture on Tuesday, master bedroom, daughter's bedroom and a sectional microfiber couch, spending about $4,000. The first day they could make the delivery was today, but they came before noon so not that terrible. They brought everything in before starting to set it up and I made a comment to my husband that our bed frame seemed a bit on the small side. He assured me that it was the correct size. Why would he do that? Because we made sure three times at least while in the store we were ordering a king sized bed. So the delivery guys set it up and after everything was together we went to sign the papers making note of one piece of the sectional couch they forgot to Scotch Guard. So I made the comment that the frame looked small, and the delivery guy said it was a queen. To which I informed them that I had told my husband it looked too small before they had put it together, to which they said they saw the king sized mattress and one had asked if they were taking that away too before they set the frame up. You would have thought they would have asked to make sure before they put the it together, so after that I didn't feel so bad. So we call the manager whom we bought the furniture and who will be receiving the commission and he told us he will be delivering the correct bed by 9:00 PM tonight. We had also borrowed a truck off one of my husband's relatives and load it up with old furniture to take to my sister's apartment an hour away, and of course... it's raining, and now we are waiting again. So we wait a while longer and then we call the store to give them a phone number to contact us so that we can go to my sister's. We get there, set up, and our "new" fish tank is loaded back into the truck and my husband heads back towards the house and I head to Wal-mart. A bunch of money later I am heading back to my sister's so that my daughter can spend the night with her cousin even though she has a nice new bed to sleep on. So I get back to the house to hear the news that the guy that was suppose to deliver our bed rented a truck and is making a bunch of other deliveries before us. So we wait and wait and wait... we are still waiting.

The Point: If you are going to deliver furniture and happen to screw up on something, do not make a mistake on the payer's bed... Break a mirror, a lose a draw to the night stand and drop the bloody dresser while going done the road, just don't make them sleep on the couch.