I bought a $10,000 open box Blue Star range from EM Custom which was described in pristine…read morecondition. It was delivered severely damaged and with parts having been removed. The business owner, Mike, has blamed the transportation company, but is not taking any responsibility for getting it fixed. Based on other dishonest conduct on part of Mike, I've now come to believe that the stove was shipped damaged.
I saw the listing for the item come up on eBay as I had been looking for this range for a while. Once I added it to my watch list, Mike contacted me on eBay and offered it to me with some additional incentives. The stove was described as a showroom model having never been used, in perfect condition, but was missing two grates from surface of the stove.
He offered me additional incentives if I would pay him on PayPal, which I didn't think much of at the time. I often pay for my eBay purchases with PayPal, and he sent me a link to his PayPal account. I sent him the payment and he arranged to ship the product. What I only later became aware of is that he cancelled his eBay listing in order to avoid paying eBay's commission for the sale. In doing so, he excluded me from the purchase protection all eBay customers get when they purchase from eBay.
Stove took about 3 weeks to arrive and a freight company dropped it off. The stove was on a pallet, wrapped in bubble wrap. The pallet was integral and the bubble wrap had no damage, so I signed the freight receipt that said the item had been received in good order. I set about opening the bubble wrap and I immediately noticed that something was off. There was significant damage to the stove. In addition, the stove was missing the electronic gas valve that controls the small oven. This looked like it had been removed because the electric wires were intact, the gas line had been unscrewed (wasn't severed in a violent event), and the support bracket was intact as well.
Within 1/2 hour of receiving the item, I contacted Mike to tell him about the damage, and I had reported it to RoadRunner, the freight company. Mike said I should never had signed the receipt if the product had damage and that this was now my problem. I estimated the damage at about $2,000 based on the parts that were damaged.
I asked him to file a claim with freight company, which he did. They denied the claim. On the claim denial letter I noticed that he had filed a claim for $18,000. Not the actual retail cost of this model, which is $16,500, not the $10,000 that I had paid him, and not the $2,000 worth of damages. I guess he was hoping for a windfall profit if the freight company had accepted the claim.
Given the denial, I offered to split the repair costs with him. This is customary in 'hidden damage' claims. He refused, and said that "ultimately youre (SIC) still the winner you have a 20K stove for 12K". I told him that I disagreed and that I should be getting what we bargained for. My offer to split the repair costs with him was more than generous. At that point he called me all kinds of names and suggested I was trying to defraud him by damaging the stove myself and claiming the repair costs from him (to what end I would have damaged a perfectly good stove, only to claim repair costs from him, he never made clear).
The commission fraud against eBay, and the attempt to defraud the insurance company, leads me to believe that he is not an entirely honest person. And I keep coming back to the gas valve that was taken clean off - that was not damaged in transit!! I believe he sold me a stove that had been damaged already and hoped that I'd catch the damage before signing the freight receipt (and therefore claim the freight company).
So, here I am with a 10K stove that I can't use. I can't install it while the credit card companies do their thing to figure out if we should ship it back to him. It's been 3 months and my whole kitchen project is stalled.
Fair warning, avoid doing business with this company. Even if this is all one honest mistake, the fact that the owner won't stand up and take responsibility (after all, he packed the item), and instead takes a defiant attitude towards his customer, should give anyone pause. You never know what can go wrong with a kitchen install or appliance purchase. Plenty of other vendors offer the same equipment without the risk.
