Bad experience with poster company....

Handy

MGF, Master Grumble Framer
Joined
Jun 17, 2005
Posts
787
Loc
Manitoba, Canada
Yesterday I ended up gathering up a certain company's poster books and throwing them in the trash!!

I was so angry. Two weeks ago, I placed and order for 16 posters. YESTERDAY I got a phone call from the owner of the company telling me that 8 of the posters I ordered were unavailable.

I said to him "Well, I'm surprised to be hearing this from you now - I ordered them 2 weeks ago. I had been expecting them to show up any day now"

Well, he got upset and started in on me about how they have 40,000 different prints and he can't spend the time to check each and every one right away and with the volume of orders he can't just jump right on that becasue it takes so much time. (usually when we order prints they will tell us as they type them into the computer if they are in stock or not.... seems like standard industry practice to me...)

Then he went on to tell me how the poster business is crumbling all around them and that it's widespread and how the companies are having to lay people off, etc, etc. Then onto how much the companies spend billions of dollars on their catalogues, etc, and do I actually think that they do that to disappoint people???

The thing is, we only NEEDED one of them for a customer, one of those 16 posters - and it was unavailable. The rest were for a window display in order to pad the order. So in my way of thinking, it wasn't worthwhile getting the remaining posters anymore. So I told him that I would like to cancel that order until I had time to check it over and re-evaluate what we were going to get.

Well, this just set him off again! He started in on me and I finally said "I'm sorry - but I'm trying to be nice about this and you are getting very angry at me. You have to understand my point of view - when we have a customer who comes in here and spends hours searching out the right print, and they order it and then 2 weeks later we get a call saying that it's unavailable - it makes us look bad to the customer. If we have a frame company who consistantly sends us bad product,or backorders all the time or discontinues without telling us ahead of time, we won't carry their product because it makes us look bad to the bottom end customer."

Well, then he basically told me that "you'll just never comprehend this "(as though I was too stupid to get it) and he told me that I may as well just throw his books away (which by this time I was planning to do) and then he hung up on me!!!

good grief! I did not get angry or yell at him or anything like that. My business partner was watching with interest and even said "you were not rude at all - you were very calm and talking normally".

It just burned my butt! Maybe the guy was having a bad day or what ever - but if he thinks that he is going to grow his business by treating customers that way he's going about it all wrong! I feel sorry for him if his business is going down the tubes - but the internet and box stores have affected us all - and we all have our problems to deal with - us included - and I definately didn't need to be made to feel stupid.

Anyways, after this I talked to another poster rep and he did confirm that there is big problems in the art poster business, but at least he was polite about it.

So, now we have 4 less books to clutter up our poster table......
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Enough being nice, I want names.

Come on it feels so much better to rant when you give someone up.

Also I want to see if I have any of their catalogs! Remember one thing about customer service, make one person happy and they will tell their friends, make someone upset and they will tell EVERYBODY!!!
 
Another reason to use a consolidator like Lieberman's? They respond instantly or darned near as quickly
 
I have all but thrown out all of my poster catalogs. The main reason is that I can't get any up dated ones. I have contacted two companies to please send their new ones and they just haven't.

I'll see what they have at the show, but with the internet, I bet they just can't compete. That's why I am so I'm thankful for LJ's new venture, at least that will offset some of what
we have lost.

I would like to know the name of the company though so I can be sure not to buy one of their catalogs in Atlanta.
 
well, I don't want to name names, exactly - don't want to get in trouble or anything like that - but I will tell you that it's a Canadian distributor for Image Conscious.

Won't be likely that many of you are using them - seeing as there doesn't seem to be many Canadians around here, but, there you go......

It was so absurd it that it's laughable - but I'm still feeling a burning deep down. I haven't had me a good one like that in a long time - I didnt' know if I should laugh, cry or have a fit!!!

it was a great way to start off my day. I told my partner "I just DARE someone to come in here and be rude to me today......." and he thought that was pretty funny.......
 
Why would you think you would get in trouble?? You did nothing wrong and you would be doing nothing wrong by posting the name of the company. We all want/need to know as it might affect our business as well. We in the US might not be affected but there are enough Canadians on the G that they would appreciate the heads up.

Plus, with an attitude such as you described, they deserve to be outed!!

You reap what you sow!!
 
Sandra, one of the reasons for this forum is to help each other out. If there's a problem that can be worked out, we work it out, but in a case like yours, forwarned is forarmed. I know a lot of warning posts here that have saved me from some headaches that would've occurred had I not known about it here first. That's what we do for each other. And we know there are many who don't post here, but still value our experiences, we reach a lot of framers!

Word spreads fast. Good stuff too.

Power to the Grumble!!
 
ok then - the company is Minotaur. We didn't order from them often, so maybe they thought we weren't good customers or something. At least they weren't one of our main poster suppliers - not that we sell a ton, but we've been very happy with the service from the other companies.
 
OMG!!!! NOT MINOTAUR!!! Oh... wait.. I don't sell posters.

Never mind!
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