I'm posting this on behalf of my sister - she lurks but hasn't got an MN account. If anyone asks anything I can't answer she'll text me her response. it would not be simpler at all for her to just sign up to MN already She wrote the AIBU, hence why it's in the first person.
So, here goes:
I bought posh paint from Abigail Ahern website here. I had trouble right from the start with their online order form freezing after I entered my card details. When I called to explain the problem with my order they were very dismissive and just told me the website was working fine – well, it wasn’t, but I paid over the phone and waited and waited for the paint. It arrived a week later than anticipated and I had to get in touch with Fedex myself to find out where my order was as AA were uninterested. I’d ordered one tin of emulsion and one tin of eggshell in Mott for one wall in my living room, we’d already painted the rest of the room and have over the last year painted the entire flat using Dulux, Crown and Farrow & Ball. We have never had the problems we had with this paint.
We put on three coats and it was patchy. We didn’t have much paint left, so we rang to complain (it says on the tin it will cover in 1–2 coats) and we were talked into taking a replacement tin instead of a refund and reassured it wouldn’t take two weeks to arrive. It did arrive quickly. The fourth coat was okay. When you saw it in daylight it still wasn’t perfect but we were so fed up of painting that wall that we decided we could live with it.
We then opened the eggshell to start painting the woodwork on that wall, and it was like water, runny and drippy. We did two coats on a small bit of the woodwork, and it was awful. Over the next 5 or 6 weeks, we sent photos, AA sent a courier to pick up the paint so they could test it – who then phoned me to complain that nobody was in – of course nobody was in, they didn’t bother to contact me to tell me someone would pick it up and we were at work! They eventually picked up the paint and we heard nothing for weeks despite emailing asking what was going on. They didn’t reply to emails but on at least three occasions swore they had. Oh yeah, and they added both our email addresses and my work email to their mailing list and sent us weekly sales emails...
Eventually, I phoned to be told that they’d ‘tested’ it and found nothing wrong with it so they weren’t refunding us. They said we should be happy we’d already had a replacement – for one tin out of two, when both were unusable, and since two tins had been picked up for testing we didn’t have either the paint or the money! DP called them again to point this out and they eventually agreed to refund us for the eggshell, but they refused to refund us for the emulsion as we’d had a replacement tin. I bought replacement paint from another supplier to repaint the whole wall, both eggshell and emulsion to make it match. (I have tried colour-matching with Dulux and it’s never been exactly the same colour.) The new paint had no problem at all covering the same woodwork. I originally spent £78 on the two tins, and we’re supposed to be getting £40 back. I have paid on top of that for the new paint. I have now waited 7 working days for a refund we were told would take 2–3 days (after I phoned to chase it when 4 days had passed, they claimed to have said 2–5). Today I tweeted them and was told they needed my card details again - when were they going to contact me about that? It will now take another 3 working days to give us the partial refund. I originally ordered the paint in late June, it’s now September!
Am I being unreasonable to want a full refund, not just for the one tin? And to generally think their customer service has been abysmal?