Called and asked to have someone come out to look at some pest problems that had just started. I was told someone would be out on a specific day and time to do an initial look, and that I had to pay the $150 fee in advance for the appointment; this was explained as a way of avoiding the onsite techs needing to deal with credit card payments in remote areas that have no cell coverage, so I agreed.
The first problem was that the person showed up 45 minutes late. I had a work call fifteen minutes later, which wouldn't have been as much of a problem had he shown up closer to the original time.
I welcomed him in and we started talking. He quickly mentioned that the person at the office said we wanted to talk about setting up a maintenance agreement, and didn't seem specifically interested in doing any inspection or work as I described the problems. I've owned houses for twenty years and have hired lots of people to do lots of work, this behavior was odd. He was clearly pushing to do a maintenance contract, whereas I was focused on an immediate need. He reluctantly said that they could do a one-off project, and that the payment for that day would count towards the work. He also said that he couldn't tell me what the cost would be for any of the work, he would have to talk with the people at the office to confirm the costs. And he couldn't say when the work would be done either. He finally explained that the costs would be based upon the size of the house, so he offered to measure the square footage of the house and find out from "the office" what the costs would be for both a maintenance program and a one-off appointment. At this point he went outside to measure the house, I had to go deal with my call for work, so my wife (who hadn't been a party to the initial conversation) followed up with him when he returned; despite his hard sales pitch, she said she'd talk with me after work and we'd get back to them.
For our ~1,600 sq ft house their annual maintenance play was going to be $610, minus the $150 already paid. A one-off service was going to be $450, minus the $150.
In short, we paid $150 for a sales appointment. Given that they have a standard approach on how to handle their service they should have explained this over the phone and saved needing to send out a sales person.
I've worked door-to-door sales, sales-by-appointment, and have worked in the consulting industry for almost twenty years, it is a despicable practice to charge for a sales appointment.
Ultimately I cannot speak to the quality of their actual work, because they didn't do any actual work for the money we paid them.
What I can speak to is that their foot-in-the-door task is a scam because you're paying $150 for someone to do a sales call. read more