Unbiased Truth about DirectBuy...
Complaint
DirectBuy Employee
Country: United States
I worked at Directbuy in California for 6 months, if you want the absolute truth here it is. DirectBuy is the worst company on earth to be employed by, associated with, or have a membership with!
Directbuy is a corporation that is franchised, which means that someone owns each center, so they are all run differently. The one I worked for was Directbuy of Burbank California owned by Greg and Gail Ruetz. They are absolute blood suckers! They promised each employee a 401k when the center opened in 2007, not one employee has seen a 401k, any type of retirement plan, or even a christmas bonus!!!! All they care about is YOUR MONEY. They know nothing, not one thing about the products they sell, but you can be assured one of them will greet you with a fake smile as soon as you walk in the door.
From the moment you walk in the door, you will be preyed upon. Its costs $6500 to join this garbage corp for 2 years. They say they dont mark anything up, but there is a 8% handling charge on everything, isnt that a markup? None of the employees are actually trained, I was thrown onto the floor and forced to learn about 800 manufacturers on my own. Then, two weeks later, 75% of our staff was laid off. Wow. All the owners want is more money and more members! To give you an example of the service you will get, our center has 1500 members and 3, yes 3 people that work in the service department!! Unbelievable.
When you walk in the door, everything is set up. From the way the greasy salesman shakes your hand to the "hows your day going so far" questions, its all script. Then you hear the stupid story about Directbuy and they act like your friend with small talk. Then, you watch 3 horrific movies about DB in a presentation that is much like a timeshare presentation. After the ordeal, where they lie to you about many many things, then you are sent off to a high pressure salesman who will tell you to join or never comeback. If you are not smart enough to smell scam at this point, you are simply weak.
Once they have your money, they couldnt care less about you or what you need. The fake smiles go away, and the truth comes out. You will wait from 4 weeks to 16 weeks for your merchandise, and if it comes in damaged, you will wait that long again. Shipping is expensive and in most cases will bring the cost of the merchandise well above what you could have gotten it in the store for.
You will not save money at Directbuy unless you are remodeling a kitchen with $100,000 budget, and even then its not worth the hassle, problems, and the wait!!
I despise this company. They are immoral, they treat their employees like garbage, and they lie about everything.
Bottom line, run away from Directbuy! Thank god I no longer work there. Now I can sleep at night.
Directbuy is a corporation that is franchised, which means that someone owns each center, so they are all run differently. The one I worked for was Directbuy of Burbank California owned by Greg and Gail Ruetz. They are absolute blood suckers! They promised each employee a 401k when the center opened in 2007, not one employee has seen a 401k, any type of retirement plan, or even a christmas bonus!!!! All they care about is YOUR MONEY. They know nothing, not one thing about the products they sell, but you can be assured one of them will greet you with a fake smile as soon as you walk in the door.
From the moment you walk in the door, you will be preyed upon. Its costs $6500 to join this garbage corp for 2 years. They say they dont mark anything up, but there is a 8% handling charge on everything, isnt that a markup? None of the employees are actually trained, I was thrown onto the floor and forced to learn about 800 manufacturers on my own. Then, two weeks later, 75% of our staff was laid off. Wow. All the owners want is more money and more members! To give you an example of the service you will get, our center has 1500 members and 3, yes 3 people that work in the service department!! Unbelievable.
When you walk in the door, everything is set up. From the way the greasy salesman shakes your hand to the "hows your day going so far" questions, its all script. Then you hear the stupid story about Directbuy and they act like your friend with small talk. Then, you watch 3 horrific movies about DB in a presentation that is much like a timeshare presentation. After the ordeal, where they lie to you about many many things, then you are sent off to a high pressure salesman who will tell you to join or never comeback. If you are not smart enough to smell scam at this point, you are simply weak.
Once they have your money, they couldnt care less about you or what you need. The fake smiles go away, and the truth comes out. You will wait from 4 weeks to 16 weeks for your merchandise, and if it comes in damaged, you will wait that long again. Shipping is expensive and in most cases will bring the cost of the merchandise well above what you could have gotten it in the store for.
You will not save money at Directbuy unless you are remodeling a kitchen with $100,000 budget, and even then its not worth the hassle, problems, and the wait!!
I despise this company. They are immoral, they treat their employees like garbage, and they lie about everything.
Bottom line, run away from Directbuy! Thank god I no longer work there. Now I can sleep at night.
Comments
In Arizona, we enjoy a 3 day cooling off period for this sort of transaction. It came in very handy after we got home and did some research on the products they were offering. Though we might have "saved thousands" on some very nice high end furniture, in truth the items we were most interested in buying were building materials and we would not have realized any savings on them over shopping with local Mom & Pop type retailers. So we immediately signed our cancellation option and Fed-Ex'd it back to Direct Buy.
This is where my beef with them begins. They ignored our request. 15 days after we had returned the cancellation notice, nothing had been done. We drove back to the warehouse to speak with the GM (sales man) who had signed our contract. He refused to speak to us. We asked for the name of the owner and were shown the door, treated like trespassers or common criminals. Now, that company had invited us into their warehouse and offered us a membership, we had not called them. Anyway, they treated us horridly. We immediately contacted AMEX and had the payment rescinded. Then we reported their antics to our Attorney General's office and the local BBB.
If you plan to buy lots of fantastic furnishings and appliances, then this may be a great option for you; but if you live in the Phoenix area and are considering joining to for remodeling materials, you can do as well or better on building materials just shopping locally. Happy Shopping!
Directbuy Niagara is the worst company I ever seen in North America. They say nothing other than lie.
As with everything there are scams and those who will take you.....our membership was reasonable, we have saved, the service has been good and we have not experienced irresponsible owners.
The two things I know to be true is that there was an 8% markup and the membership fee was bumped up from about $5k to $6.5k when they opened the new stores in TO and Burbank.
I left the company because of Denny's daughter in-law threatening to have me fired and the way Denny supported this low end uneducated idiot. She would thank people for their help as if she owned the place, though she was only about 20 years old and was an employee just like everyone else but because she was married to Denny's son, who was a very nice kid by the way, she acted as if she was everyone's boss. Besides the economy and the ridiculous way they managed money, I believe another major factor in their decline was directly related to having family members work for the company...something Greg Reutz had an issue with early on.
Directbuy itself was not a bad idea but as the membership fee increased with the opening of these stores they diverged from what was reasonable. They also relied on less then qualified people to run the Sales Dept., Denny's daughter in-law at one point was made the sales manager, which makes little sense since she was not very likeable and extremely inexperienced and, though this didn't last long, I'm surprised the Greg went along with this.
Either way, they eventually filed for bankruptcy and not only did both Greg and Denny lose almost $1 million on their investment, a bank in Lakewood and the SBA were stuck with about $2.5 million in worthless debt.
Either way, the company closed as a result of bad timing and poor management but as far as these people being "blood suckers", the person making this comment is just a disgruntled idiot and someone I probably worked with.