I wish I had thought to look at just one online review before I decided to order trees from this nursery. Everything about this online nursery sounded too good to be true, and it was. On May 25th I ordered 5 trees as a birthday gift for my mom. One of the trees was actually alive, the rest were dead sticks. The company claims that the trees are shipped in a dormant state, and therefore show no signs of life, but they are actually just dead.
I tried to contact the company to take them up on their advertised replacement policy. They offer no refunds of course, and in fact they actually charge you again to replace the dead trees they sent you in the first place. I tried and tried to contact the company, first by calling their customer service line. I called several days in a row, at various times throughout the day during their listed business hours just to make sure I didn't just happen to be calling during somebody's lunch break or something... No answer, no answering machine, the phone just rings until the call is disconnected.
Next I tried sending them an email, I waited several days and no response. I finally looked up some online reviews and what I found was just sickening. There are hundreds of horrible reviews that can be found online. Some describe the exact same scenario that i experienced, there were also a variety of other horror stories.
Next I filed a complaint against this company with the better business bureau. They got back to me several weeks later and also had no luck contacting the company. There is a flag on the BBB website for this company and a little article about them. The BBB rates them at an F.
After this I contacted my bank about just getting a refund.By some miracle the bank managed to get the company on the phone for a 3 way call. The girl on the phone was clearly annoyed that I had gotten the bank involved and told me that they are there every day to answer calls. I explained my many attempts to call, and that not even the BBB was able to get through to them. She had no comment on that. She said they do not offer refunds even though the trees were dead on arrival.instead they would send me a form in the mail to fill out for replacement trees and they would ship out in October. Too bad I live in Minnesota and trees that I ordered in May are no longer of any use to me in October.in addition I am not about to give them even more money so they can send me more dead trees. So I am totally out of luck and out of all the money I spent on these trees.
In addition to the bad reviews, I found that this company has already been sued by the state of Tennessee. It seems that they simply changed the company name from Autumn Ridge Nursery to Summerstone Nursery and continued running things as usual. Apparently their scam is so profitable it's worth it to just pay off the restitution, change the company name and keep right on scamming. Below are some sources for further reading.
Http://www.tn. Gov/attorneygeneral/cases/autumnridge/autumnridge.htm
Http://www.bbb.org/nashville/business-reviews/nurseries-plants-trees / summerstone-nursery-in-morrison-tn-37039832
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