Complaint Review: Casabella A.K.A. Kaminstein Imports

When I was hired as a Customer Service Rep at Casabella, I knew that I would be the only CSR in the company. I did not know how many extra responsibilities would be expected of me that were not part of customer service.

In addition, the company does not have the best communication skills and there were many things that were never shared with me that had a significant impact on my day to day interactions.

My primary responsibility was to support the company Sales Representative force and the customers that Casabella would ship to. I was not aware that when I was hired I would be speaking to every unhappy owner of a Casabella product or someone that had general questions about the line. I was also responsible for helping consumers place orders on the Casabella.com website. Issues concerning the website also became mine which included handling returns and credit to charge cards. The initial training gave me guidelines on how to handle consumer issues. Three months down the line the warehouse began to complain about the volume of replacement merchandise that they had to ship out. Rich Kargauer, the COO then began to work up a plan with the Debi the National Sales Manager so that I could shift the responsibility of the refund or replacement to the retailer that sold the consumer the merchandise. There were not only calls regarding complaints about defective merchandise, I constantly had to answer calls from consumers about where they could get replacement heads for Casabella items and I also had to hear much complaining about the price of shipping these items from the website.

When I answered the phone which rang a lot, I never knew if it was a retail store or a consumer at the other end. The cooperation between myself and the shipping department was hit or miss. I received a good deal of calls from Sales Reps asking me if the shipping department would be getting an order out on time since they had not done so in the past.

When I asked my supervisor to speak to the shipping manager about over-due orders, he turned the task over to me to contact him directly instead of getting involved. This type of ?management? was very commonplace. One time I asked the Shipping Manager about an order and he told me to ?tell them to take a Prozac?.

The Sales Manager began to delegate her administrative tasks to me to do which only increased the amount of work I had to do and the time that was taken away from what I needed to do for the Sales Reps and Stores. In a nutshell, I was Customer Service, Consumer Affairs, Administrator of Website Store and now Assistant to Sales Manager.

There were not enough hours in the day for one person to handle the volume of faxes, email and tons of voicemails that would pile up. There was no way that one person could do a good job at this position. Due to the fact that there was no job description presented to me upon hire, the company decided to continue to add responsibilities to me when someone left the company. I was given additional work to do with the website when our IT/EDI Administrator moved away and I seemed to get much more Sales tasks when the Sales Assistant left the company one day. The environment of the office was extremely noisy and people shout about. This affects my ability to hear and be professional when I am on a telephone call. Furthermore, I have had the Sales Manager shouting instructions out of her office to me when I was on the phone with a buyer from a store. The Sales Manager even made the comment to me that ?we have to get you off the phone with those consumers.? When I signed on for this job it was not my understanding at all that I would be dealing with consumers but the gal who had the job before me did. Of course it would be nice for all the problems to just go away but when every other day you hear about new defects in the products and no one is taking an action to remedy the situation, it causes my anxiety level to rise. One night when I was staying late to answer some consumer emails my boss asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was responding to emails from consumers and he said ?I don't care about consumers, make sure that Wild Oats gets a credit for an order they sent back because I can't afford to lose them as an account?. I was never given any training or instruction on how to handle returns or credits other than to issue an RA so they can take deductions. The company liked to do this to reduce paperwork and it was my belief that they were not very diligent in handling this because no one was ever assigned to do it and when it was brought up in an email by the Accounts Receivable coordinator, it fell on deaf ears. Everything done at this company was a knee jerk reaction and there were no procedures in place. When you ask about something and want to get a procedure going the answer is always, ?next week? and it never comes.

The behavior of Management at this company was extremely bad. To add to an already stressful environment, I had to be subjected to the verbal abuse of management to fellow employees. I was told that a person was fired from the company because of poor attendance and this person was cut from an already lean group. The environment was most unprofessional as there was cursing and shouting around. The Sales Manager would tell the owner that he looked like a terrorist on regular occasions. There was just no respect whatsoever. When I was on the phone, there were many times managers were screaming around the office instead of using an intercom or visiting someone in their office. This was most unprofessional. Three months into the job, the owner Bruce sat me down and wanted to know of some of the situations and obstacles that I was facing. His assistant Rebecca wrote everything down and nothing was ever said or done about the things again.

All of a sudden, the Bruce's wife Judy gets interest in the way consumer issues are handled and she wants happy consumers. When I showed her the policy that the Sales Manager and the COO came up with, she had never seen it before. She suggested that I give a copy of it to the VP. Judy was seldom in the office to oversee the website, during the summer she was never around and her thrust is volunteer work at the Women's Shelter that Casabella donates money to, getting her daughter off to another college after Tulane got flooded in Katrina and taking care of her aged mother in physical therapy in Florida. I gave a copy to the VP and I was told that I would be meeting with the Sales Manager and the VP and the COO to go over the consumer handling and the day we were supposed to meet, the VP was bellowing at the A/R coordinator and was not able to meet. Naturally, the meeting was never rescheduled despite the ever increasing amount of consumer issues that loomed up on the horizon every day. There was no appreciation in this company. Word was out that the Accounts Payable gal was going to get fired. This is so demoralizing and unprofessional to make something like this common knowledge for the other employees. Management needs to learn how bad something like this is.

The worst thing was being put in a position where I could not be truthful with the stores or the consumers. When they would ask me about an item that constantly broke, I would have to skirt the issue and play stupid. The company had no plans to stop selling or have the stores return these items. Sometimes I would send one replacement and then another when the second one broke. The new items introduced were not extensively tested and there were many defects that I heard about from the public as well as the fellow employees who purchased the items. I was so stressed out from all of this that I felt that I was in a black hole that I could not emerge from. Things were not getting better, they were only getting worse. My sleep was disturbed and I was beginning to isolate myself because I began to find myself saying ?I hate people?. I know from past jobs that one's day does not have to result in personal frustration, turmoil and stress because I have worked at places where there was teamwork, cooperation, quality control and more than sales figures being the bottom line. It would trouble me so much when the COO would make up rules for customers as he went along. One day he told me to tell someone that their order was ready and then several days later he has me tell them that the merchandise is no longer there and that they have to buy a more expensive item or wait another month and half for the next delivery. When the customer called me frantically to ask me what happened to the merchandise and proceeded to tell me that I cost her thousands of dollars in business I was sick to my stomach. I had no idea what had happened. I imagine that the warehouse shipped the goods to someone else first. Also, I got stuck doing all the dirty work like telling someone that we could not accept an order under $300.00 and then hear back from them about their displeasure. Of course if this was a rule across the board, I could deal with it but when someone else ordered less than $300.00 two days later, their order was accepted. I was being put in a very adversarial position with customers.

It is my belief that a Customer Service Rep is supposed to help the customer and not make doing business so difficult that they want to go elsewhere. Sales Reps who worked for the company would often complain to me about stock outages and would accuse the company of selling all the stock to a bigger customer than theirs. I had to put up with so much un-necessary aggravation that six months was all I could handle at this place.

The managers working at this company are all buddy/buddy with the owner and they don't like for him to hear about all the problems. The Sales Manager's husband gets Bruce good lease on automobiles. There is no one in a ?Human Resources? capacity to speak to. When I asked the Controller named Gus about vacation policy, he said ?didn't you get an employee handbook??. If I got an employee handbook when I was hired I wouldn't have asked for it. Several other new hires didn't receive the employee handbook and it was me who made them personal copies. I got my employee handbook 5 months into my employment. Sweeping problems under a rug is not the way to make them go away. When I would present a problem about a wring mop breaking to the Sales Manager and the COO, the Sales Manager did nothing about it and when I told her that I emailed it to her weeks ago, she acted like she had no clue. When I re-sent the email, now all of a sudden she remembers it. I was at my desk working hard and I had to listen to everyone else talking on the phone about personal matters with their kids, kid's doctors, friends, whatever. When a call came in and they didn't know where to route it, it got dumped on me. Also, it's so important to go out to Dunkin Donuts for a coffee run. I get new Sales Reps on the phone begging me for guidance because they can't get in touch with the Sales Manger. I was the public dumping ground for this company.

You can ask questions and never get answers. In fact, I asked the Controller in an email if I could have some type of compensation toward my supplemental insurance because the company was not paying anything for me to have medical and dental benefits. When two weeks went by with no answer, I sent another email to Gus. Two days later he comes over and tells me that ?Rob, (the VP) isn't taking the company offered plan and he isn't receiving any compensation for it. I was told the medical and dental plan was ?take it or leave It?. First of all, I don't care to know or need to know the business of the VP who must make more money than God. Secondly, why should an answer have to take over 2 weeks to reply to? Finally, is ?take it or leave it? what you really want to say to an employee who is showing up for her job every day, on time, in all sorts of weather and stays late on many occasions without receiving any compensation for the time spent?

Casabella doesn't have hot water in their building. Do you know you have to wash your hands in ice cold water as well as washing your dishware or mugs. When I was there I tried to get someone to install a toilet tissue holder on the wall since they had them propped on top of a huge commerical roll dispenser that they didn't have a key for.

What good would speaking to Debi or Richie have done? It would have only caused them to resent me because they are unhappy with themselves. Richie and Debi enjoy having someone to control, to do nasty little tasks they feel are beneath them. Richie is not happy that he wasn't made VP and that Rob Moser was brought in from the outside. Debi is just a power hungry woman who takes great delight in terminating sales reps. Before I left, she told me that I would be responsible for coordination of things when she would be at upcoming trade shows. So basically, I was Customer Service, Consumer Affairs, Website support, Assistant to the Sales Manager and responsible for answering the phones when the receptionist would step away from the desk and it would ring out from the voicemail system.

The company was getting a new computer system and was talking about expanding the warehouse. In January, they were bringing on a Sales Assistant to work with Debi. They spend money on a day out at Chelsea Piers for the employees to do ?team building? exercises and give out awards to the people who they think have worked the hardest at the year end company party. The shipping manager is a totally miserable person and if you try to get him to do his job, he only drags out things even longer. Shipping mistakes happened all the time because no one is careful and no one cares. But guess who had to clean up all the messes? yes yours truly.

Most individuals in this company is either a puppet, a phony or just a plain old butt kisser. I was actually referred to as a Customer Service Manager. This was the biggest joke as a manager has staff and I couldn't even get any manager to give me timely guidance and help.

Casabella doesn't have hot water in their building. Do you know you have to wash your hands in ice cold water as well as washing your dishware or mugs. When I was there I tried to get someone to install a toilet tissue holder on the wall since they had them propped on top of a huge roll dispenser that they didn't have a key for. Getting something simple like that done was a federal case and it never happened.

Since I left in January, they have fired an A/P Coordinator and also an Inventory/Purchasing Coordinator. Were these people bad individual? Not at all, they were scapegoats for lousy managers that didn't do training or managing. They were the sacrifical lambs so these deadbeat managers can maintain their high salary and powerful position.

As far as Casabella products go, they are mostly trash. They had a metal dishboard which let water pool on the bottom and had nowhere to drain. Their microfiber products are not colorfast and they end up bleeding even with close following of care instructions. Their Zoom Broom is a noisy piece of junk which is just an overglorifed carpet sweeper. The Magnet Mop is a design flaw and they break left and right. Instead of doing quality control, it must just be easier to replace broken items for people that complain. Can you imagine how many people throw the junk in the trash and never buy another product.

If you go to the Casabella website, you can get almost any item at full suggested retail price. This to me is a conflict to the distributors that Casabella is selling to. The only items that should be for sale on a website are refill items that might not be locally avaiable at a store. If I had a nickle for everytime someone complained to me about the high shipping costs at Casabella.com I would be rich and retired.

My suggestion is, don't work for them and don't buy their overpriced, fancy packaged crap, you can get a better household cleaning product at the supermarket or the dollar store for a fraction of the price.

There is still only 1 CSR at Casabella and she is half my age, she is 20. Casabella does well to have someone young and inexperienced with proper customer service, someone they can bully, intimidate and push around. This CSR fell down the stairs when she was a temporary worker and the company didn't even have the heart to send her to the doctor to get checked out. They didn't want to be responsible for any medical bills.

Bruce- Owner of the company. He has shifty eyes. He can't look you straight in the eyes, he is totally deceptive and fake. His goal in life is to suck off the ample breast of Bed, Bath and Beyond until he dies or sells the company. He allows his managers to run his company so his sales are good and that is his bottom line.

Debi- Sales Manager. Would rather be working at the job than being a mother to her two young sons. She is good for screaming around like a truck driver, cursing and driving to Dunkin Donuts for coffee.

Richie- A passive agressive person who I believe truly has great contempt for women. He is nasty to females and I can't believe he has a wife and a daughter. Does not want to get involved with anything, wants to keep the customers in the dark as much as possible. Thinks it is funny to tell someone who inquires about the disposition of broken brooms to "shove them up their a$$". Is totally jealous of Rob because he wasn't promoted to VP.

Rob- V.P. One of the phoniest people I have ever met. The only saving grace is, when Richie refuses to talk to a customer, Rob will step in and do the right thing. Rob is all charming to people he likes, if he doesn't have any need for you to fetch him a lunch, he will never bother with you or he will talk so nasty to you that you want to drive a stake through his heart.

Gus- Controller This is a poor victim of circumstance who has been recruited to do the bidding of every dirty deed of the top four people. His good soul has been slowly eaten away by the sharks he consorts with. He needs the job, enough said.

Ron- Warehouse Manager Mr. Bad Attitude, if I look intimidating and give you flip answers maybe you will leave me alone. Given a staff of underpaid immigrants who show up when they feel like it. Wouldn't you take a day off here and there if you were only getting $8.00 and hour to sweat in a warehouse with no air conditioning. Ron is totally oppressed with all the ridiculous requirements that are put upon orders by big customers and believe me, Richie doesn't give him any help.

Arlene- A/R An angel, a decent hardworking person who Casabella is not worthy of her.

Jae - A/P A darling woman. Was promised training when she started and is now being blamed for not progressing in the job. Her boss Gus hasn't had the time to give her any training. If she is lucky, they will fire her next and then she can get a real job in a real company.

Carol - Marketing One of the most kind hearted, sincere people that I have encountered in a while. Works her butt off and gets no appreciation or recognition. Casabella is not worthy of her either.

Steve & Elaine- Webmaster & Art Department Two extremely helpful and talented people who again.. Casabella is not worthy of.

Jae & Arthur EDI Dept. Two guys who are doing the work of four and haven't had a nervous breakdown yet. Both are gentlemen in the truest sense of the work... Casabella is not worthy of either of them.

Then there are several others too that I just don't know well enough to comment on, a new gal Marcy who works for Debi the Prima Donna, Chris.. another one doing Debi's work and another temp that was hired named Wendy that doesn't something there...

There are two jobs open and if you are smart, you won't apply for either one. Kaminstein was sued by a former employee in June of 2003. Also sued by a Beme International, LLC v. Kaminstein Imports, Inc. (2005) Lead counsel for Beme International in a trademark declaratory judgment case brought by Beme in California and in defending a separate trademark infringement case brought by Kaminstein in New York, both involving the CASABELLA trademark for home dr items. Negotiated an early settlement and all claims were dismissed with prejudice.

So the fact that NYS Dept of Labor didn't give me a penny for the time I was gone from Kaminstein Imports is no skin off my nose. The whole system is corrupt and the judge I had told me something very interesting at my hearing last week. His comment to me was "What do you care? It's not your company,"

I hope everyone left a Casabella feels that way because you can't make any headway in a company like this. You can't be ethical, fair, dedicated and conscientous when almost everyone around you is a toxic, morally bankrupt, money hungry, egotistical maniac. I am so happy I no longer sit near a drafty window by an atrium that whistles and leaks when it rains. No longer am I subjeted to obscene language, shouting around and someone interrupting my calls and shouting out of their office what I should do. I took this job because I needed the work and was on unemployment for three months and was getting stir crazy. Do yourself a favor and do a lot of research before accepting a job. Google your potential employer, pull up the court records under all their names for the county they are based out of. Don't be like me and end up with a 6 month jail sentence.

Wendy
Rockland County, New York
U.S.A.