Do not buy Benchcraft furniture!
I will be including that sentence in every blog entry for the next month. Hopefully, with it mentioned so many times, it will show up in the returns when people google Benchcraft.
Here's the story:
We purchased a sofa and loveseat from Furniture Factory Outlet World in Waxhaw, NC. Actually, we bought the sofa, loveseat, a bookcase and our complete master bedroom suite from them. Very reasonably price. Very easy people to work with. There is some sort of understanding that the furniture from there is factory seconds. It's not. It's all good stuff. They save the big bucks on the stuff by getting it direct from the manufacturer using their own transportation. So they've cut out the middleman. They also have a very interesting showroom...it's an old High School. Not air conditioned. Maybe not heated...I don't know. It seems we only go there when it's very very hot. They are only open Thursday through Saturday and they don't deliver. Also, you don't order stuff. You don't find stuff and then think about it. If you find something, you'd better buy it on the spot because it might be gone tomorrow. Bring a truck.
So, last August we bought all this stuff. The sofa and loveseat were a brand name called BENCHCRAFT. One year warranty. Leather.
Sometime about April or May, Mensa Boy sat down on the couch with a bowl of cereal. He was getting himself situated and set the bowl down on the cushion next to him. When he picked up the bowl two strips of leather came off the cushion, stuck to the bottom of the bowl! The bowl wasn't even sticky!
The strips were very thin, almost paper-thin. One was about an inch long. There was no hole left there. You could see the un-colored fabric underneath. It's like it just ripped the color off in those spots.
Now, I had just started to notice a couple weeks before, that there appeared to be little pin-prick kind of spots appearing on the seat of the loveseat. They were cream-colored and the furniture was a nice maple-brown color, so it was fairly noticeable.
I pulled out the paperwork and verified that there was a warranty and that it hadn't expired and then I called the store. They suggested we take photos and bring them in. So we borrowed a very expensive digital camera from MB's office and took the best pictures we could. The couch problem was easy. The tiny little spots on the loveseat were very hard to pick up.
Outlet World agreed right away that something had to be done. So they started calling Benchcraft. After about 6 weeks of trying to track down the manufacturer's rep, calling us every couple of weeks to assure us they were still pursuing it, they finally were able to get a response from Benchcraft. "We'll send a repair kit." the Benchmark yahoo said.
The kit turned out to be a bottle of colored liquid that we were supposed to paint onto the spots. Sort of like whiteout, only brown. Fortunately, Outlet World has a repair guy and so they sent him to our house with it. He walked in the door and said right away "This is not going to work. It's not going to color those spots and even if it did, it'll rub off on your butts after a few days." He tried the stuff and proved himself correct. He went back to the store to report.
About an hour later Outlet World called us. "Well, we were thinking maybe we'd just switch that furniture out for you. Do you want leather again or cloth?" I asked them about Benchcraft. "Well, they say it's owner-damaged, so they aren't going to do anything. But don't worry about it. You just come over and pick out something else."
And so we did. Friday we found some stuff by a totally different company. We actually like it better. And yesterday we borrowed a neighbor's truck and with Tony's help we got the old stuff over to Outlet World and the new stuff back here.
So the moral of the story? Don't buy stuff with the Benchcraft brand on it. That warranty bit means nothing to them. Customer service apparently means nothing to them. But if you must break that rule, get it at Furniture Factory Outlet World in Waxhaw, NC. Phone number 704.843.2128. And ask for Jim. He's a great retired guy that works there. All their salespeople are on commission, so be sure to ask for him. He's not pushy. Just friendly.
Tomorrow I'll tell you about Soya and the new furniture and the Youth Group's Servant Evangelism projects.
8:09:39 AM 
|
