Complaint Review: Celebrity Prime Foods - Celebrity Foods Inc.

If anyone ever gets a call from a company called Celebrity Prime Foods, don't even listen to their spiel, just say NO! and hang up.  This company is terrible. They're a food delivery company. When we got our call, it sounded like a good deal. You order six months of food up front, and make monthly payments for it. You also get a commercial upright freezer that you can pay for monthly, because you'll need it to hold all the food.

It sounded good at first, but the food was not worth the money. The cost was way higher than if we were just budget shopping at the store, and the quality was not what they promised. Also, we ran out of food after just about four months. When I called to tell them that we'd run out and how we were supposed to make the food last six months, they said that their time prediction assumes that two meals are eaten out per week.  In this economy, really?

I paid off the food in March of this year (2009). Last week, my husband applied for a Visa through his work, but there was a mark on his credit report for $446 outstanding on a loan. The loan for the food!!! I called the company and they confirmed it was paid off on March 22nd of this year, and said they'd take care of it.  Too bad the damage was done already.  If it's not cleared up in the two weeks they said it would be, we'll be filing a dispute.

Rewind a bit, to around March when the food was paid off. I left message after message with our customer service rep, Christopher Assaf, to pick up the freezer. When we signed up, I asked *SPECIFICALLY* what would happen with the freezer if we didn't renew, since our jobs were iffy at the time. He said "No problem. We'll do whatever needs to be done."

So I called about twice a week for a month to have the freezer picked up. At one point, the admin at the office said that it might be better for me to just call customer service, since the CSR wasn't in the office often. I called customer service and explained the situation, and he said he was sorry, but they weren't in the appliance lending industry, and the freezer was a final sale. I argued till I was blue in the face and all I got out of him was a promise to talk to the CSRs manager and call me back. I've called about 10 times since then and have NEVER gotten a call back.

Fast forward to early October, 2009. My pay cheques got switched from weekly, to every other week. I had three weeks worth of payments that had to be made from two weeks worth of money because of this. I called the loan company (that holds the loan for the freezer, Home Acceptance Corp ("HAC"), more or less a loan shark agency that's owned by the same people who own Celebrity Prime Foods) and explained the situation, and said that I couldn't make the payment that month but would double my payment the next month. They said that was fine.

Fast forward again to November 12th, 2009.  I got a call from the HAC credit department at 8:45pm, asking me to make a payment on the phone right then. I told the caller that I had called and made an arrangement the month before, re-explained my situation and said that I had a double payment coming out on the 20th of November.  She said that wasn't acceptable because that was over 31 days past due and would be put on my husband's credit.  She said that the 20th of this month was past the billing date, and I told her that I realized that, but it was within the 10 days grace period, and the previous tele-agent said it was okay. She hung up the phone.

Four days later, in the mail today, was a letter from HAC. IN HUGE LETTERS it said that because of our default on our loan, they were calling the whole loan due!!!  That's a $2,200 loan due because of ONE payment that's overdue.

Holy moley, "how much is this payment, for them to take such drastic measures?" you're asking - $74.00. Although they've put the overdue as $159 (two payments, even though one is still in grace, plus a $10 late fee).