I purchased a new fridge for my kitchen renovation. I phoned Hi-Speed so that I would not have to worry about the heavy lifting of getting thee fridge into my house. I figured that since they bill themselves on their business card as "appliance moving specialists" that they would think of the potential problems associated with moving an item like a fridge into a house.
When I was setting things up with Hi-Speed, I dealt with Frank on the phone. He seemed pleasant and helpful and we arranged a date and time for the delivery.
When the fridge arrived at the house, it did not fit through the front door. Turns out that the doors would need to come off the fridge and this is where things went wrong. The delivery guys refused to take the doors off the fridge because it had not been authorized on their work order. They put the fridge in my garage and left. This is obviously not a reasonable solution as it is quite inconvenient to go to the garage every time you want a glass of milk!! I hired Hi-Speed, a company that called themselves an "appliance moving specialist" because I don't ever move things like this and I wanted a professional, someone who does this kind of thing regularly, so that they would have the experience to say before hand that there might be a problem with this or that.
When I called Hi-Speed back to discuss how my fridge was going to get from the garage to the kitchen, Frank was very rude and unhelpful. He told me that it was my fault that the fridge didn't fit and that I should have thought of that before I bought it. He said that it wasn't his fault that my house had normal sized doors and that my fridge (which he knew the size of when we booked the delivery) wouldn't fit through them without disassembly (a service which Hi-Speed offers for a fee). Frank finally agreed to send a crew back to the house to move the fridge into the kitchen and that he would split the cost of doing this with me. He also wanted to charge full price for removing the doors.
Once the fridge was finally in the kitchen, I tried to contact Chris, the manager at Hi-Speed to tell him of my experiences with his company. This took two weeks as he didn't return my calls. When I finally did get to speak with Chris, he promised to look into the situation and said that he would get back to me. This never happened which is why I am writing this review.
I will not recommend Hi-Speed to anyone, and I informed my retailer who recommended them about the poor service.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $120.00
- What could this company do to improve their services?
- All Hi-Speed and Frank would have had to do to prevent this from happening would be to notify the customer while arranging the delivery. If Frank had said to me something like "This is a medium sized fridge. It may or may not fit through your door. If it does not, there will be a charge of $xx.xx to remove the doors." That simple statement would have prevented the whole problem. Alternatively, the delivery crew should have said, "I see that you haven't authorized removal of the fridge doors. We can do that for a fee of $xx.xx, would you like that?" Instead of "sorry, it is not on the work order, we can't do it. Do you want us to leave this on the driveway or will you open the garage so that we can put it there?"
- Any advice to offer fellow homeowners facing a similar project?
- Ask lots of questions of your delivery company. Try to think of what the potential problems are and ask Hi-Speed while arranging the delivery. Don't assume that just because they call themselves "appliance delivery specialists" that they know what they are doing.