eh, I hear you, but does Best Buy set up a series of (essentially) shell companies with a bunch of fake reviews? Maybe they do, but I don't think so.
Its a regional or nationwide contracting service. Now they have your number. Expect a bunch of spam calls for different services you'll never need.
Kind of surprised some of you are not agreeing with my use of the word scam...and instead it's overpaid? Overpaid would be if I went to Mike Calvert Toyota and paid 120 bucks for an oil change or something. It's a legit business who "ripped me off". But this was a dishonest scheme. They pretend to be someone else by setting up shell/fake local businesses. update: after leaving a review over the weekend, i got a call from gdsr manager who owns the store (or so he says) in houston wanting to know what happened. he said he will refund me 200 dollars...didn't ask for anything in return. claims he is not part of the scam or the other gdsr company. he is aware of them. he couldn't answer my one question: how did his local company get my service request when i didn't even know they existed? whose toll free number is it?
INTERNET! You could suffer a tragic accident, have your leg amputated below the knee, and people here would tell you that you should have sought out a second opinion and that they definitely could have saved your foot by operating in their parents' basement. But honestly, I think it's semantics: sketchy business practice is not a "scam" to some people. You have to literally be robbed of money, with nothing to show for it (not even a couple of springs) for those people to validate the word "scam." And that's fine. (EDIT: See post after this one for clear example -- I love people's fervent views of semantics.) Glad to hear you're getting $200 back. All these business models, sketchy or not, reward going to extra trouble and are based on people not wanting to go to extra trouble. That's just America in the 21st century. Make the consumer do as much work as possible to get a just or fair deal.
Scammed = realizing you paid more for a service than you later saw you could get cheaper. This is plain buyers remorse. Do your research. Car repairs would be considered a scam by this logic.
The services were rendered at the agreed upon price. A "did not do your research" convince fee of $165.00 was added. The problem with calling this a scam is it diminishes legit scams out there. I can understand if the springs were really not broken but they over charged you for new ones. It reminds me when I paid $99.00 for a run capacitor for my AC and then a $75.00 trip charge and still sat two days w/out AC in the middle of summer. If I took a couple hours to research and trouble shoot, I could have had AC the same day and only paid $7.00 for the run capacitor.
Actually my reason for calling this a scam has nothing to do with the price I paid for it. $150 is not going to put a dent in my wallet. I never said I was upset at being ripped off. Ignore the price I paid and look at the actual business model. Scam can be multiple things. Not just when someone doesn't render a service you paid for. If i called company A to come out based on their advertisement and reviews, then I expect that company to come out. Don't put up a fake company with a fake address with fake reviews. If you guys actually take the time to read the stories out there, you will realize the actual small businesses these people are imitating are losing business or getting angry calls when it comes to the job not being done right or for warranty work. Owners of a Plano company, Everything Garage Doors, tell The Watchdog that sometime in June, somebody changed their business phone number in online listings to GDS' number that rings into GDS' Carrollton call center. "I just want to let you know that they are still at it," owner Jodie Avary says. "They are still taking advantage of customers and now have literally stolen our business by changing our phone to theirs. Our family has felt the loss of business."
I'm trying to piece together how this went down, and I'm not sure I understand all the parts. 1. You tried to call a local Pearland garage door repair business you found on google maps. 2. Instead of getting a real repair place, you reached a lead aggregation company. 3. That company then sold your lead (I think) to some dude with "Garage Door" on his t-shirt. 4. Dude legitimately fixed your garage door but charged you a large premium. 5. A manager for the "Garage Door" company you paid volunteered to refund you after a bad review, but didn't say how he got the lead in the first place. It sounds to me that you got the confluence of two bad events. The first is a shady lead aggregation business that pretends to be a local repair guy so they can field the call but they then sell that lead to someone else to fulfill the order. The second is that the worker scalped you at the point of sale. The manager either didn't know the worker quoted so high and feels bad about it, or else has an M.O. that he refunds people who give bad reviews to make the bad reviews go away (where did you leave this review anyway? Is it reasonable that a small operator would have found your review of him so promptly?). My question would be whether the repair company has a customer-facing arm of its own, or does it get all of its work from buying leads from an aggregator. If they generate their own sales, the manager is probably just concerned about treating his customers fairly; if they buy all their leads, he's probably just trying to make bad reviews disappear.
You are spot on so far. The original company I called looked very much like a local business in Pearland. Turns out the the address they have listed is an address for an apartment building (no, doesn't include a unit number). I noticed that on multiple other "local businesses". If you look up the address, it's someone's home. This is who I called initially. Btw, I called them again earlier and asked where they were located. He said oh we are all over..what can I help you with. I said what city are you in..he said oh we are in "pier-land". This is the company who came out: https://www.facebook.com/GDSandRepairHouston/ I left a review on their google search result on Saturday and he called me first thing this morning. In my review I had said oh springs should have cost around 200...maybe it's a incidence that he gave me exactly half my money back. P.S. I took the review down for now.
I am not sure what "online listings" could have been changed. In this particular case, someone out there is violating someone elses registered business name. I generally stay away from businesses who use Facebook as their website... or no website at all. Too fly by night for me.
I would like to echo this sentiment. Using NextDoor you can get not only local businesses but also read various reviews by people in your area. I did this exact thing to repair one of my garage door springs recently. Dude showed up, looked it over, replaced the bad spring and charged me $80. It was a great experience. I've had similar experiences with minor appliance repairs and even significant remodeling.
I will try nextdoor...next time. I have used thumbtack once for a plumbing issue. It was positive and the rate was within reason.
That sucks. I've always noticed that I get a TON of ads for garage door repair in the coupon book I get in the mail every month. That and air-duct cleaning. You have to be careful how you research for stuff like this. I usually go to the Kingwood bbs and ask who everyone recommends. Then research the top 2 or 3 names that get recommended and pick one of those. Hell, CF is great for that kind of thing, actually. I've got tons of great recommendations here over the years.
moral of the story, always do your homework BEFORE you hire and pay some scumbag. Also, Yelp is your friend.
