Ashley Furniture Debacle

Off-topic
1

Some of you may remember that we purchased some new furniture over a year ago now (back when I had a job), three pieces of Ashley brand leather living furniture from a Rockford store that was going out of business. Last month, the internal wood framing of the arm assembly of our recliner sofa broke. When I turned the sofa over to see what was wrong, I found that two of the screws had come loose and one had fallen on the carpet beneath the sofa, a manufacturing/assembly problem in my mind.

So I went to Ashley Furniture to turn in a claim. The warranty said that we had a one year warranty on labor and a three year warranty on parts. No problem I figured. But what I didn’t know is that Ashley buried a disclaimer deep within the tiny print of their warranty excluding warranties on any furniture used as floor models or purchased from a going-out-of-business sale. That was pretty low in my eyes because we purchased the furniture from an authorized Ashley dealer and received the furniture new and in the manufacturer’s original shipping containers. Ashley turned me down twice, so I went to the Better Business Bureau. The BBB contacted Ashley and received an answer back from the Consumer Affairs Manager at Ashley that they are happy to make exceptions to the warranty in certain conditions, but that the arm assembly of our sofa was not a replaceable part. So I sent Ms. Andre this letter:

Ms. Karen Andre
Consumer Affairs Manager
Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc.
1 Ashley Way
Arcadia, WI 54612

Dear Ms. Andre,

I received your response to my claim through the Better Business Bureau website concerning our one-year-old broken Ashley sofa. For reference sake, I have copied the response you submitted to the Better Business Bureau:

[i]Thank you for contacting Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc. We appreciate that you have notified us regarding Mr. Edwards’ situation. We take these matters seriously and investigate them as promptly as possible.

Mr. Edwards purchased furniture from a former authorized Ashley dealer, K’s Merchandise, during their going-out-of-business sale. The Limitations and Exceptions portion of the Ashley warranty provides in part, “These Limited Warranties do not apply to (i) merchandise that was, at any time, used as a floor sample or a display model, (ii) any merchandise purchased “as is” or second-hand, (iii) any merchandise purchased at a distress sale or going-out-of-business sale, or (iv) any merchandise purchased from a liquidator.”

We are happy to make exceptions to the warranty when we are able to provide parts for repairs; unfortunately the part Mr. Edwards is requesting is not considered a replaceable part. We do not have the option of sending the arm assembly as he is requesting.

If you have additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to call me. My telephone number is 608-323-3377, ext. 6102.

Sincerely,

Karen Andre
Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc.
Consumer Affairs Manager[/i]

I must say I have been and remain extremely disappointed in the position Ashley Furniture has taken in this situation. I realize the need and understand the reason for the warranty verbiage addressing floor model furniture and the like. However, as I have stated several times, our furniture was purchased from an Ashley authorized dealer while they were in operation and we received the furniture new and contained in the original Ashley Furniture shipping containers. The three pieces we purchased were not floor models or in anyway used or touched by the public. You admitted above your willingness to make exceptions to your warranty policies. I ask again that you extend that exception to us. We purchased our furniture from a representative of your company in good faith expecting to be supported by you as your customer. Only one year later, our beautiful and expensive leather sofa is unusable and sitting idly in our living room and we are left wondering what happened.

I do not understand why you state that an arm assembly cannot be made available. If Ashley were to visit our home to fix the sofa, wouldn’t the repairman simply install another arm assembly? If an arm assembly can be made available, my offer to self-install the arm remains. If an arm assembly is truly not available, I would sincerely appreciate Ashley Furniture fixing our broken arm assembly. If this cannot be worked out, our sofa becomes nothing more than disposable, and again, that after only one year, a very unfortunate state of affairs.

Ms. Andre, please contact me personally to discuss this issue. I sincerely hope that we can resolve this issue to the best of both of our interests. I can be reached by phone at (**) -. I look forward to your call.

So I got a call from Karen Andre yesterday. She said they have discussed it and she is authorized to offer us this deal. If we will sign a waiver saying that we will not pursue any more warranty claims on our furniture, they will send us a check for $250.00. We really don’t have a choice so I just called her back and accepted her offer. Nothing more I can do except never buy Ashley furniture again. I tell my boys this all the time that I have a habit of not taking no for an answer when I feel that it’s necessary. I tend to take on a go-getter attitude for stuff like this and we were able to recoup something in this case because of it. Good life lesson to be aggressive and stand up for what you believe yet maintain professionalism and respect, which I believe I did. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, most time like this one, it does.

I will probably fix the arm piece myself but the lack of access will make it very difficult to do a good job.

2

As I’ve said before. People, take notes. This is how a real gangsta rolls!

Keep yo’ pimp hand strong, Bruce!

3

Why don’t people read their contracts?

4

Because they’re too long, too difficult to read, and most people don’t know what to read for or the consequences of subtle changes in wording.

If every purchase came with a long contract we would never be able to buy anything without bringing a lawyer along. That’s why we have consumer protection laws.

5

I understand that, but why would anyone sign an agreement that does not suit the interests of the buyer?

In other words, why don’t people read their contracts?

6

Because it’s furniture. It’s not a big deal. Plus, normally, there is a bit of trust involved in things and life, it’s just that not everything works out perfectly in life. Life’s not like that. It moves too fast to stop and decipher the legalese of every jot and tiddle (can’t believe I used those words) of every contract. Besides, spending time on other things is far more important…like watching my wife’s face light up when she realizes that the furniture is headed to our home and soon will grace our living room, be the envy of the neighbors, and provides many evenings of fine relaxing reclined with our feet up, swathed in leather, and watching a great movie.

7

You actually read the warranty on everything you buy? On every piece of software you install? Ouch. Or maybe just if it’s over a certain dollar amount?

8

That’s the Libertarian way. The buyer gets the responsibility of negotiating favorable consumer friendly terms cause that’s not the responsibility of the government. For consumer protection you’re on your own to negotiate for yourself and determine if the product is safe.

That’s why I can’t get behind Libertarian economic principles. The only way to make it work as a consumer would be to spend all of your free time researching what is safe, reading contracts with sellers, and turning simple consuming into a full time job.

Consumer protection laws and standards are a good thing when done reasonably. What is reasonable differs between Republicans and Democrats but neither wants to get rid of consumer protection the way the Libertarians do.

9

If it’s important, yes.

Afterall it is the law of the land:

As this case is, if you buy something at a discount, you may want to look into what you are buying and the terms of the sale. Bruce bought something from a store that would likely not be able to service it in the future.

The buyers. A business is unlikely to stay in business if the terms of the sale are not favorable to the buyers. As to if the product is safe, the libertarian way does allow consumer protection, but if it says otherwise in a contract you agreed to, then you waived that protection.

10

Mmmm, interesting.
I always thought ‘the law supercedes the contract’.

11

I agree. Maybe we should have taken time to read the warranty, but at the time, other things were more important. And I have to admit that we did buy the furniture knowing that we wouldn’t be able to have it serviced at the seller. We made the mistake of assuming that we would still have some sort of manufacturer’s warranty as is normally the case. In this incident, we were wrong. But no big deal. It’s not a huge issue.

The thing is, warranties tend to be a bit less important to me because I finally managed to graduate from the school of the mechanically declined. So I fix things and most times end up overengineering my fix-its and come out on the other side with a better product than before. (Mary just had me open a sticky jelly jar. I guess I have other skills, too.)

12

I think Gilby’s taking too narrow a view of contract use. Sure, a business is going to use contracts to cover their collective arses, but a business that really cares about their customer is going to brush the contract aside and uphold “the spirit” of the transaction.

That is, if someone sells a piece of furniture, they’re going to make sure their customer goes home with a piece of furniture and not a pile of rubbish. If it turns out that it’s the latter case, the business should do their part to rectify the situation.

A business that does no more than take in money and hide behind a contract when a dispute comes along is no business I’d want to deal with. And as Mr. Childs has noted, no one wants to keep a lawyer in tow in order to make simple business transactions.

What next, Gilby, signing a contract before taking your groceries home from the store?

I thought that was the case too… in fact, I’ve seen clauses in contracts that attempt to render each clause “discrete,” in that if one clause is found to be illegal or invalid, that the rest of the contract may still be upheld.

13

A quick google search shows the web is full of complaints against Ashley Furniture.

Sounds like you did better than most by getting some cash back.

14

I agree with that, but my view of contract use is not narrow, though I understand you perceived it that way. The facts are that this situation was a company liquidating their inventory and closing. It should be expected that there is no warranty, as the case ends up being.

The contract is the terms on the packaging and used in the store. No signature needed, your exchange of money for those groceries means you’ve agreed to it. You’re not without protections. If you buy spinach and it happens to be contaminated, then the store broke the contract (or someone in their supply chain did). If you bought chicken that was contaminated with salmonella, in which the handling instructions on the package provide a safe use of it, then the grocery store is not liable for your misuse of the product as the result of not following the instructions.

Formal contracts usually have a jurisdiction mentioned, usually mentioning a state, and therefore all applicable statutes and laws from that state. It’s possible that a part of a contract would violate the laws of that jurisdiction and therefore need to be modified.

15

Why should it be expected that there is no warranty?
It is the store that is going out of business and liquidating, not the manufacturer. Ashley Furniture is the manufacturer, is still in business, and is not liquidating. If it is a manufacturers warranty then it should not matter if the store is liquidating or not as long as Ashley Furniture got its money for the wholesale sale to the store.

The reason for voiding such warranties is to protect other authorized distributors from being undercut by a liquidation sale by a formerly authorized distributor. The manufacturer is deciding that relations with distributors is more important that doing the right thing for the final customer. That is not consumer friendly.

Consumers expect a warranty to be a warranty without petty and unexpected exceptions. We have no time to deal with petty exceptions.

16

Thank you, John.

17

Ok, then expect to pay the higher price for the product if the warranty is included.

Instead of returning the items to the manufacturer, they removed the warranty, lowered the price, and probably advertised both these issues to the shoppers, so that they could more efficiently get rid of the items they needed to liquidate.

18

The wrap-up.

Mary and I signed the release, sent it in to the Customer Service Manager, and received a response telling us that she sent a check request to accounting. We should be receiving the $250.00 check within the next week. I’ll use it to get our sofa fixed…this time. Next time our sofa breaks due to poor manufacturing and inadequate quality control, I guess we’re on our own. Such is life.

Lastly, I wrote a letter to the Chairman of Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc.

Mr. Robert G. Wanek, Chairman
Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc.
1 Ashley Way
Arcadia, WI 54612

Re: Customer Support

Dear Mr. Wanek,

I am writing this letter to inform you of a customer support issue that has developed between my family and Ashley Furniture. Here is the short story.

In November of 2006, we purchased three pieces of Ashley leather living room furniture from K’s Merchandise in Rockford, IL. Soon after, K’s Merchandise went out of business. Thirteen months later, the internal wooden framework of a sofa arm broke. When I turned the sofa over to investigate the problem, I discovered that screws had come loose (one had fallen on the carpet beneath the sofa) causing the arm to receive additional stress and structurally fail, so I contacted Ashley Furniture to submit a warranty claim. A few days later, I received a letter from Ashley Furniture stating that, because I had purchased the furniture from a going-out-of-business sale, there was an exception to the warranty and we were not covered. I promptly contacted Ashley Furniture again explaining that we had received the furniture new and in the manufacturer’s original shipping containers and requested that Ashley include our purchase under warranty. Upon being turned down again by the Ashley representative and still feeling strongly about my stance, I filed a claim with the Better Business Bureau.

The BBB received a reply from Karen Andre concerning our claim explaining that Ashley Furniture would be happy to make an exception to their warranty policy, but in this case, the broken piece was not a serviceable item. After communication between Ms. Andre and me by both phone and email, Ms. Andre informed us that her office had agreed to send us a check in the amount of $250.00 if we would sign a release agreement removing the possibility of any and all future warranty claims by us. My family and I sensed that, had we turned the offer down, we would not have had another, so we chose to sign the agreement and use the money to cover this one repair.

Mr. Wanek, as we have signed the agreement, we have no other recourse than to unfortunately consider this event closed. The reason for this letter is to inform you of the episode in hopes of convincing you to enact policies that would enhance the value of your future customers. As I informed Ms. Andre in my last email to her, transactions between consumers and manufacturers should come with a degree of trust that, to the manufacturer, the consumer is important, the attention to the merchandise is grand, and the purchase is invaluable. We should be able to expect a warranty to be a warranty without petty and unexpected exceptions. If every purchase came with a long contract that we had to take time to read, we would never be able to buy anything without bringing along a lawyer. In this case, we will recover in time from our losses. But to know the attitude of Ashley Furniture toward its customers will be firm in our minds and, at this point, we will never again be a customer of Ashley Furniture.

Sincerely,

Bruce Edwards

Edit: Thanks to my forum buddies for some thoughts to include in my letter

19

That letter was grand! The ending nearly brought a tear to my eye… very moving, Bruce!

20

Case closed.

Ms. Andre of Ashley Furniture responded with this rebuttal through the Better Business Bureau:

As mentioned in my initial response, Mr. Edwards’ furniture is not covered under the Ashley warranty because he purchased on an “as is” basis at a going-out-of-business sale. I would have been happy to send him the parts he requested for repairs; unfortunately, the arm assembly cannot be shipped separately from the rest of the frame.

While we maintain our position that the furniture does not qualify for warranty service, in an effort to satisfy Mr. Edwards, we offered him $250.00 to keep the furniture in it’s current condition. Mr. Edwards signed a legal document agreeing to the arrangement. A check is being sent to the address he provided.

If you have additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to call me. My telephone number is 608-323-3377, ext. 6102.

Sincerely,
Karen Andre
Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc.
Consumer Affairs Manager

I responded with this on the BBB website and checked the box that I had accepted the company’s proposal:

Although I strongly do not agree with the policies and stances held by Ashley Furniture Industries on the aforementioned warranty, out of options, I have reluctantly accepted their proposal of a $250.00 check to cover the repair to our furniture. In accepting the check, I have also reluctantly signed away any future customer support regarding our furniture.

I have received the check from Ashley Furniture and have deposited it into our personal banking account.

I have no other choice but to consider this case closed. But as a last stance, my family and I will state that we will never be a customer of Ashley Furniture again and will advise all that ask for our advice to steer clear of this company.