kitchen counter top in granite
I did a lot of research, and was not let down by Tempo Tech. Good price, great install (needed some tweaking, but they had no problem returning to make it right).
I bought 1000 square feet of stained maple. The wood is great quality. I had my own installers do the work, and they were reluctant to use flooring they weren't familiar with. I purchased a bit extra for wasted and damaged boards. As it turned out, the wood was excellent and we wasted very little. As a result, i had about 60 square feet left(3 full unopened boxes). Read the fine print on the receipt re returns and called just to confirm. I was informed the only returns accepted are non stained products. Not what the receipt states and in the show room, virtually all the wood is stained! Now I have approx $250 of boxed wood sitting in my garage, essentially waste. My installers were very surprised that the wood couldn't be returned. At any rate, the important thing for anybody reading this post is that the quality of their hardwood is excellent. Not happy about the return policy, and I wanted others to be aware.
Thanks very much for your review, we do appreciate the feedback on our quality. We manufacture & distribute our own brand. Our best sales team are actually the installers. And when a new installer installs our wood and likes it, it means that we'll get on average an extra 8-10 sales per year just for that installer. So yes, we try hard as heck to monitor the quality. We are very strict. Anything that doesn't meet our QC standards gets put on the clearance/odd lot section of our web page and sells for a discount.
To re-cap our return policy, here is a link to our web page where we outline the polciy. http://www.threetowersflooring.com/tc-949/sc-957.html
A normal rate of waste is between 5 and 10%. So to play devils advocate, hypothetically speaking, lets just say we get an order for 10,000 square feet. And you come back 6 weeks later and say, "well I measured wrong, or my wife wanted to do the rest of the house in tiles, so I only needed 2500, and I want you to take back the rest..."
The other problem we have with taking back boxes, is that we simply do not know what kind of conditions they are stored in once they are shipped out of our warehouse. Our warehouse is climate controlled and kept at constant humidity/temperature. Who's to say that a customer doesn't store his wood in a shed in his back yard, or in his garage. And when he brings it back, the wood can be warped, or damaged and no longer useable. Would you, as a customer want to pay good money to have someone else's sloppy seconds? I don't think so.
Some policies have to be made with the greater good in mind. That's the bottom line here.
We are not Home Depot or Lowes, we are a small boutique manufacturer/distributor run by 3 brothers. This is what customers need to understand. In order to compete with a Home Depot style return policy, we'd either have to increase the price or decrease the quality. My advise, is to just follow the industry standard and order between 5 and 10% extra.You don't want to run short, and if you do have 2 or 3 boxes left over its not necessarily a bad thing. You would be surprised how many people have a small leak or flood, or have some furniture moved and are looking for extra wood to fix their floor.
