My girlfriend followed me to Maryland. She hired MBM Moving Systems to move her stuff. For the most part, everything went fine. But her sofa showed up with oil stains on it. She didn’t pay for an extended insurance policy, so her damages were limited to 60 cents per pound, or $180 for the sofa. This covered slightly more than the cost of having the stains removed.
Unfortunately removing oil stains from fabric is really hard, and the company she hired to do it wasn’t very successful. We decided to flip the cushions over and live with the remaining stains. They weren’t that noticeable. But then we got a big surprise. The bed in the sofa was wrecked beyond repair. I have never even been able to figure out how it was damaged so badly. It must have taken some immense force, like say dropping it a story, yet somehow the exterior of the sofa was not damaged. In any case she was screwed.
But it gets better. In order to get the $180 for a sofa that cost around five times as much, they made her sign a document that said they had no further obligations and that she would not report them to any reporting agencies such as the BBB. And she had to get it notarized. I doubt that such a document would hold up in court if it was challenged, but they still withheld her money until it was signed and notarized.
I needed a cheap sofa for my house. So I bought her a new sofa bed, and took her still-functional-as-a-sofa sofa bed. Value City Furniture (VCF) has lower end furniture that you can get at good prices. We found a sofa bed that I thought was comparable to, but maybe not quite as nice, as what she had, and it was on sale for $500. When we picked it up, I made sure it was intact and that it included the bed. It was possible to buy the same sofa without the bed for $100 less, so I need to make sure they didn’t screw it up. Everything looked good.
And yet it wasn’t. After we set it up and attached the feet, I found out that the top of the bed was three to four inches higher than the bottom of the bed. Basically, it was unusable. I don’t understand how such a thing ever could have even left the factory. It would have take 10 seconds to pull it out and look at it and see that it was not fit for sale.
By now I’m getting upset. She spent around $900 for a sofa that only lasted a few years. Then she spent another $100 on an air mattress to replace the bed. I invested another $500, and we still don’t have a working sofa bed, never mind the time we’ve invested. I drove all the way back to the store to verify the demo model they had shown us did in fact have a bed that was level with the ground. I was told to have the service department have a service technician come out and take a look.
More to come.