In late spring 2017 we asked Northeast Fabricators to give us a price estimate for some simple steel weldments and a few miscellaneous parts needed for a project we had planned for summer shutdown. We first contacted the owner of the business, Peter Kirchner, but the woman who answered the phone said Mr. Kirchner was away and said we could talk to a Jim LaFrance about what we wanted. Mr. LaFrance asked us to email our drawings to him and he said he would give us a quote within a few days. We did as he asked but we never heard anything from Mr. LaFrance again, even after we called and emailed him several times. We asked another shop for a quote and we received our quote the next day. We've since talked to many other project leaders at other businesses who had the same experience with Mr. LaFrance. They all said they were completely ignored by Mr. LaFrance even when he said he would get a price to them. They also had to choose other shops to quote their work. We can't believe Mr. Kirchner allows Mr. LaFrance to be so unprofessional and ruin chances for Northeast Fabricators to acquire new clients and show themselves to be responsive and reliable when asked to quote work. We spoke with a man who works with another business in the same building as Northeast Fabricators. He said that Mr. LaFrance has made a habit of ignoring many of their quote requests for a long time. Unfortunately, Mr. Kirchner either doesn't believe the truth or just doesn't care that Mr.LaFrance is lazy, incompetent and unreliable even when others complain about him. This kind of thing is very poor practice and seems to be destroying Northeast Fabricator's reputation. We'll never contact them again and will advise our colleagues to avoid them, too. We have given this business a one-star rating only because Yelp won't allow us to choose a zero-star rating. read more
