To expect 'the experts' to get it right?

[gotolder]

Went into Bathstore to order a 'complete' bathroom. Spent approx one and a half hours talking through the design with their 'expert' advisor. Chose cabinets and loo and basin to fit said furniture, bath, shower fittings, wall covering (not tiles,forget proper name) flooring etc., etc.

Delivery was on time and we checked all the packages against the delivery note. Moving things around so that we could live whilst waiting for the fitter to start, we suddenly realised that there was no wash basin or bath panels. On checking the delivery note again we found that these items were not on it: phoned the store and they confirmed they were not on the order! OK, not impressed but no panic, ordered the items for DH to collect the following week.

Fitter arrives and finds there is no 'riser' for the shower tray (sorry, don't know proper term for this either); order said item to be added to the collection by my DH.

Fitter starts to install bathroom - no cistern for loo! Getting cross now but stay calm and order cistern -WRONG CISTERN IS DELIVERED!!!

How can an 'expert' miss off a cistern and, after a detailed discussion of which basin we require, then leave that off the order and not realise that baths usually have panels and that shower trays need whatever they need?

Feeling 'proper fed-up', I e-mailed the CEO of Bathstore with my complaint, making sure that I stayed polite, brief and to the point. Had quick reply from CEO's e-mail address saying that he had passed it to a member of his staff who would be in touch with me today (Monday).

Phone call this afternoon from said member of staff who apologised and said that showroom staff would have more training BUT really it was our fault! We didn't have a home visit and we were using our own fitter, not one of theirs. There was nothing more they could do. Unimpressed again, I asked how it could be our fault, as we had been naive enough to expect that their expert would know enough to add our chosen basin to the order, add the cistern to the loo etc., etc.

I'm not fool enough to expect much but AIBU to expect them to accept that they were at fault and maybe offer a small compensation to cover, at least, part of the additional cost of fitter's extra time?

Sorry this is so long - if you got this far.

Would love to have someone's opinion.

it's annoying but people make mistakes. Shrug

People do make mistakes but you have had to foot the extra costs incurred by THEIR mistakes in the form of paying your fitter for their extra time. It seems reasonable that Bathstore should compensate you for that.

what makes you think they are experts? they are simply retail employees, no different to any other shop and probably don't have a lot of knowledge about bathrooms - relying on lists and computers to say what goes with what...

Bathstore are terrible IME. They certainly used to be franchises so they vary considerably but the one we dealt with were liars. We ended up using a plumbers merchants to supply a Twyfords suite and it was much better than the overpriced Bathstore stuff.

I agree up to a point and it might be worth writing again, however you were buying stuff from a shop. The assistant does not know what your own plumber/fitter already has or will supply himself. You have paid for a simple shop assistant to help you with your purchases but not a design service. (You may have had the chance to have done that and chosen not to pay for it or to book a designer). I do agree that "expert" is misleading though.

I do feel for you but I also feel that, especially with the internet and increased price competition for everything no-one wants to pay to have anything done properly or to train employees or to put back-up systems in place and then everyone complains when it goes wrong. Suppliers have to come back with get-out clauses because otherwise they'd go bankrupt.

I hope that you get it sorted soon and will before long be happily enjoying a lovely new bathroom

I agree that it's horrendous service. Surely the whole point in going to somewhere like bathstore is because they're specialists in bathrooms. If they don't check you've ordered everything you need and that THEY haven't missed anything off then you may as well have ordered it off the Internet. I think you would have got better service from even b&q or Homebase.

It's a retail assistant not a specialist surely.
I do understand why you are pissed off but surely you realised you'd need bath panels etc. If you had to pay delivery each time it's not great but isn't horrific by any means.

Just to update: Finally got all pieces that were missing but the cistern was wrong, push button on top instead of front - reordered cistern was wrong size, too big (correct one will be delivered next week!).

Further e-mail to CEO and after phone call from him, have now been promised 1 day's pay for fitter and acknowledgement that Bathstore were at fault.

Thankyou to those who understood our frustration.