Stone-Ridge Paving & Concrete Ltd

In July we had our driveway paved by Stone Ridge Paving. One of their salesmen by the name of Dino was canvassing the neighbourhood for business and gave us an estimate of $1000 to do the work. We went against our policy of doing business with salespeople who go door to door selling their product but did so anyway as they seemed to be a reputable company. The first red flag that went up was when Dino came over to our house for us to sign the deal and refused to take a coupon, that was in a widely distributed brochure with savings for various home renovations, saying he had nothing to do with the coupon and couldn't honor it as it was put in by another salesman. The coupon was for $100 off if the job was $1000 minimum. Well, our driveway was $1000 and Dino refused to give us the discount but, for some reason, he honored the coupon for another person in our area. We should have stopped the deal right there, unfortunately we didn't.
The job they did on our driveway is terrible and we are not satisfied with it for a number of reasons which we have been trying to contact the company about for more than three weeks now and are getting nowhere. They keep telling us someone will drop by when they are in the area but we keep telling them all we want first is a simple phone call, which they can't even return.
This is the worst customer service we have ever experienced from any company we have ever dealt with and we WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS COMPANY TO ANYONE to do work for them. Our next step is to contact the Better Business Bureau and the Toronto Star if necessary.

March 29, 2010:
We have read the response to our complaint from Sal Rumero at Stone Ridge Paving and we would like to comment on his statement.

We are responding to Stone Ridge Paving's response to our initial review of the unsatisfactory paving job we had on our driveway.
In their response they mentioned that they received a phone call from me a 'few weeks' after our driveway was paved to complain about 'animal urine stains' on our driveway. If Stone Ridge recorded their customers' phone calls properly they would know that,
1)1 did call to see if someone could pass by to give an opinion about a "strange" spot on our driveway and it was not a 'few weeks later' it was during the 7 day settling period right after the job was done before we started parking in the driveway again. We NEVER mentioned animal urine because we had no idea what the marks were from.
2) You mentioned we received a visit shortly after our initial call regarding the matter and you confirmed that, in fact, it was an animal urine stain. Again this is false. If we received a visit it was while we were not home because no on ever responded, at least not to us, about my initial call to come and visit us to look at the spot. You may have talked to a neighbour or someone, but not to us. In fact after my initial call we never heard anything at all about the matter.
It was at this time we started noticing unsatisfactory problems with the quality of the job. Even after weeks of numerous calls to Stone Ridge we still did not get called back so we took the matter to the BBB.
The fact that you can put in writing that, and I quote: "we have since resolved this issue through additional communications" is completely false. How could you possibly say this? We never once gave you the impression we are satisfied. As you know, Mr. [last name removed --Ed], we are still not, and will not be happy with this driveway, but we are stuck with it now. If you are going to respond to our review, respond with honest statements.

In the spring, as we were giving consideration to the home projects that we would undertake this summer, we were approached by several paving companies with respect to repaving the driveway. We discussed this with several neighbours and after what we thought was careful research, 3 of us chose to go with Stone Ridge Paving. We should have known that something was wrong the day we signed the contract.

The company had advertised a discount of $100 off of a minimum $1,000 job. Interestingly enough, the quote for our driveway was $1,000 so we expected the discount. When it came time to sign the contract however, we were told that the salesman that had posted the advertisement had made a mistake and that the minimum that they would bill was $1,000. One of our neighbours was very upset and almost cancelled the job but we all opted to go with Stone Ridge because of what we believed was excellent quality work. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

We followed the company's direction and parked on the street for five nights following the paving. We then parked on the driveway for three nights before going on vacation for two weeks. When we returned from vacation, it was hot, before that the temperature had been below seasonal. To my surprise, when I got out of my vehicle, I noticed that the asphalt under the tires had lifted and adhered to the tire. The next day we called Stone Ridge and told them about the problem. Rather than addressing our concerns, they played the blame game. We had not parked carefully enough, the weather was too warm, we didn't understand the nature of asphalt and we should call the company that makes the asphalt, the problem had nothing to do with them.

The bottom line: The company's advertisement was false, the quality of the asphalt was average at best, and the customer service was dismissive and demeaning. Under no circumstances would we ever recommend Stone Ridge Paving.