Wow, what an incredibly, unbelievably awful experience…read more
The only reason there's a star attached to this is because you can't leave a zero-star review. Though I sincerely believe that's what Plaza Art & Frame deserves.
If you were running a business - let's say, I don't know, a picture framing shop - and someone came in to pick up a job and pointed out that the glass wasn't what they ordered, would you:
A) Say, "Oh, sorry, we'll fix it."
or
B) Blame and attack the customer, become disagreeable, unpleasant, and combative, and say, "I have a mind to not even work on them now! I might just give them back to you! Do you know how much work it is to tear these apart, cut new glass, THROW AWAY THE OLD GLASS, and put them back together?!"
If you said 'A,' you'd fix it, you know more infinitely more about customer service than Lance and Nancy at Plaza Art & Frame in Yucca Valley do. They chose 'B.'
I'll spare you the painful details, but the gist is Lance gave us a quote to frame eight small watercolors. They framed them with the wrong glass, and Nancy immediately tried to blame us, over and over, for their mistake. Then Lance came out from the back room and said the bit about not wanting to do the work to fix their mistake.
I couldn't believe how off the rails the whole thing went. I said (three times), "I don't understand the problem; we're going to pay the difference." But both of them were just awful.
A couple of years ago I brought in a pair of photos to frame, and they did a lovely job, and Lance was friendly and nice. I didn't deal with Nancy during that time.
So it was really something else to be ganged up on by the two of them. I was dumbfounded at being treated that way by a business we were paying a substantial amount of money to.
When I say "disagreeable, unpleasant, and combative," I'm not just talking about that day. It was every time we had to go into their shop for this job. I dreaded going in there (for the last time ever) to pick it up because I knew they'd be awful, and they were.
I would say I don't understand how they stay in business, but I do know. It's because they're the only framers within 50 miles of Joshua Tree. If another framer opened up shop in town, Plaza Framing would go out of business in a month.
Or maybe they'd eke out a living framing American flags and pictures of The Orange Man for the people they actually like and respect while all the queer weirdos (like us) go somewhere that knows how to treat people with decency and respect. (Yes, that insinuates what you think it does.)
Larry David did an entire season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" around opening a "spite store." Maybe I'll do that. Open a framing shop here in Joshua Tree just to spite the disagreeable, unpleasant, combative folks at Plaza Art & Frame.
Ha, just kidding, of course.
Maybe.
