Complaint Review: Flowers by Dallas

My husband and I were married on September 10th, 2011 at the Citizen Hotel in downtown Sacramento. We selected Dallas McConahay (of Flowers by Dallas) as our florist. As part of the initial contract signing with him, we provided him our VISA credit card number only for any damages or shortages, and proceeded to pay our entire balance due to him by check (which we have fully documented, including confirmation from him via email that we were paid in full.)

However, on the morning of Sept 10th, my husband received an automatic text notification message from Wells Fargo informing him that his Wells Fargo VISA was used at 8:33am at Floral Supply Syndicate in Sacramento for the amount of $604.75. He immediately sent Dallas a text message to ask why this occurred, as our bill/balance due had been paid in full well before our wedding, and his response (also via text message) was: "I will take care of this not to worry." More than 72 hours later, we have not heard from Dallas to follow-up (even in response to additional texts from my husband), and we have notified both the floral supply center as well as the Sacramento Police Dept. of this unauthorized use of our credit card, and have filed a dispute claim with Wells Fargo and will be canceling the card. As it turns out Dallas told the supply center that I had authorized him to use the card on the morning of my wedding, not once but twice. A full blown lie!

Unfortunately, even aside from the glaring (and illegal) issue above, it just was not a positive experience with Dallas. Despite initially being very friendly and eager to work with us, his follow-up and follow-through was only via pulling teeth (he would regularly drop off the radar and not respond to emails or calls for weeks at a time), and we had to line up a back-up florist for our wedding just in case (which we didn't end up using, but now wish we had.) I don't believe our wedding coordinator ever heard from him once, despite repeated attempts in the week leading up to our wedding to contact him via email and by phone.

Apparently, Dallas had some emergency come up on the day of our wedding, so he himself didn't show up at our wedding, instead sending an unknown person, a young man and his mother - unannounced and with no notification to us - to drop off our wedding flowers (late and different than we had contractually agreed to), and left everything for our wedding coordinator to set up. On top of it they were very rude. At least we had flowers for our wedding, I'll say that much. They were not ugly, but were not what we had agreed to - again, our wedding coordinator thankfully "fixed" my wedding bouquet and she herself had to set up all the tables. Without her, the flowers on our special day would have been a genuine disaster.

Unfortunately, online reviews for Flowers by Dallas (posted AFTER we had signed a contract with him) indicate that he has a reputation for misusing client credit cards - overcharging, double billing, using when not authorized, etc. - as well as failing to deliver on what was agreed to with his clients, so I can only hope others can benefit from our own disappointing experience.