Jun 16, 2010 05:43 PM
4734 Views
(Updated Jun 16, 2010 05:46 PM)
Wanted to share my first hand experience of dealing with this Store Owner – Mr Bhandari, whose way of treating customers andintegrity is highly questionable.I was given the reference of this shop, “The Interiors”, located on Baner Road (nearby Skoda show room) by my builder who had his sample apartment furnished by this shop.
On visiting the place, I found a sofa set that was pretty good value for money and a matching center table. This shop does indeed have a good variety of sofa sets (leather mostly) and the shop owner, Mr Bhandari who was manning the shop was pretty pleasant with all our enquiries. Upon total down payment, he promised to deliver all the furniture to my Aundh apartment in a couple of day’s time as he had to place an order with his factory for new pieces.
After repeated reminders and 10 days later, the sofa set & the center table was delivered at my apartment by an unruly looking man employed by Mr Bhandari. Upon inspection, I found the sofa to be good but the center table was damaged & worn out (in all possibility this was the same one that was on display in the shop) and I refused to accept it. I asked the employee to either take it back & give me a new piece or refund my money. The goon tried to convince me that it was indeed a new piece and ordering new one would take more time… blah blah! but I refused to listen and spoke to Mr Bhandari about this. He too tried to convince me against sending this back and talked about extra delivery charges if I returned it etc etc but I was in no mood to accept a damaged center table for which I had already paid about Rs6K. I offered to pick up the center table once its ready but a damaged table was a big NO NO!!
Thus began my saga of following up with this wretched chap who kept on procrastinating this issue for close to 6 months. Every time I called up, he had some new story to narrate and a new reason not to give me my center table nor refund my money. After 6 months, he refused to pick up my calls and he was never to be found in his shop. I was finally so very frustrated that I requested one of my friend (Marathi Manoos) who has connections in the Police Dept to give Mr Bhandari a call to cough up my money!! After that, the money was promptly delivered to my home without any questions asked.
This happened about 2 years ago and I was hoping that Mr Bhandari would learn some lesson from this but looking through the recent reviews on MS (this is what prompted me to pen this review!!), it looks like nothing has changed!! So, my sincere advice to potential customers is to avoid purchasing anything from this shop or if you do so, please make sure that you do not pay up front and pay only upon receiving your goods in a good shape!
