We had an automatic garage door that wouldn't open. Granted it was an older opener, attached to old heavy wooden doors, with an old two doors on a single garage door opener set up (popular some years ago). The charges from this company representative started out as a $499.00 over haul being the cheapest way to go based on his assessment of what needed to be done. That turned into a per door charge after the technician was already on site a while. (I should have realized something was wrong right then.) They did give me a "discount" on the second door of $100.00 off which helped make me not question it either.By the time all was said and done the entire bill swelled to over $1,000.00 when labor and some other parts were taken into account.
The technician also gave us a big lecture at the end on not being responsible for the automatic opener itself (which come to think of it was the nature of the original problem). Oddly enough, by the next day the same opener was again not working in spite of the $1,000.00 bill we just paid. It wasn't until we actually started pricing around for new openers that we found out most companies would have charged a little more than that same $1,000.00 dollar range to replace both doors and install both openers that we realized just how ripped off we had been for this recomended "overhaul".
Oddly enough their price for the 2 door openers when we'd asked would have also been around double the going rate other folks were now quoting too, so a "double the typical cost" trend was also developing (fool us twice, shame on us!).in fact, one of the other companies we called out to quote was able to do a very simple 5 minute/no charge repair of the current opener configuration while on site (by just reattaching two parts together where the garage opening device and the doors met) to get us operational again in the meantime.
(Another fool us once realization of just how stupid we had been.) Further web research revealed other folks sharing the same stories that we could have written ourselves about dealing with this company (or apparently multi-named companies nationwide from what we're now reading about them). Our opinion is we've come to the conclusion this is no coninsidence.
We did try to contact them to give them the first chance to rectify our feelings of being wronged, and the opportunity to give us a fair market price instead before writing this. We'd never have this company back out, and never recomend them to anyone, so their excuse of cloaking themselves in the claim of a life time warrantee on their parts being the driving force behind the huge price tag is really worthless to us.By this time, in retrospect, I even wonder if the perscribed overhaul and parts being swapped out were even necessary to fix the original problem we were experiencing.
We were left feeling stupid and taken advantage of... So we would like to add our story to your list of horror stories concerning this company and its practices... As they rang true from our experience as well.
0 comments