Complaint Review: Bill the Plumber Inc.

 We had a minor leak in the u-trap in our garage wash tub.  The fix was a 10 minutes -- 5 minutes, cut the drain pipe -- 5 minutes slide on a rubber sleeve and tighten metal ring clamps.  Will Kirst, the filed technician arrived and spent about 1.5 hours here trying to cross sell us service contracts and other unnecessary work not requested.

After insisting he get to work and stop the endless sales pitches, he finally gave us a tempoary rubber-sleeve patch instead of braizing on a new piece of pipe.  This took 10 minutes of time.  We were charged $281.62 for 10 minutes of work and an hour and 20 minutes of sales pressure. 

He tried desperately to sell us a 2 lb jar of pipe enzyme cleaner for $69.95 even though we a brand new jar of a competing product on hand which we displayed for him.  My domestic partner eventually agreed to the sales pressure when I left the room, she is not the brightest candle on the cake,  and finally agreed to this unwanted and unneeded product.

We called back to Bill the Plumber about 7PM the same evening and requested a refund for return of this drain cleaner.  We also requested that they send back a technician to remove the tempary rubber sleeve and give us a more permanent braized pipe fix as we requested. 

Bill, the owner, answer the phone.  His only response was to laugh and state sarcastically that he should have charged us "thousands" of dollars for this service -- in fact we were uncharged.  He explicitly stated that he can only make money if he runs his business like this.  He had no sympathy for us despite "Bill The Plumber offers a full range of products and services with a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee" - See more at: http://www.billtheplumber.com  This was a real slap in the face.

We cannot recommend doing business with this shady character who trains his crew to bait and switch sales tactics, i.e., come out to repair turns into an endless cross sell of unwanted and or needed service agreements.  Actually doing the repair is secondary to service sales pitches.