Complaint Review: Long's Bridal And Alterations - Orlando Florida

My daughter is getting married in May of this year ('09). She bought her dress in March '08 and was told to leave her dress and come back this March to have it fitted. We went in yesterday for the fitting and they had sold her paid-in-full dress and then kept us there 4 1/2 hours while we waited to talk to a manager and get some resolution. The manager was always "almost there" and never showed. During all of this, the employees encouraged us to look for an alternate dress and assured us they would work with us to fix their error.

After finding an acceptable alternate dress the owner, via telephone said that to purchase the dress we would have to pay an additional $100 for restocking the new dress, a policy typically reserved for those who have changed their mind about their original purchase.

I spoke to him on the phone after 4 1/2 hours and he felt it only fair we give him a chance to find her discontinued dress (an unlikely occurrence) and that we should give him a week. I said that at this point we would rather purchase a replacement dress we found and pay the difference as her wedding is fast approaching and she doesn't have time to wait on him to "possibly" find her original choice which had been discontinued.

Finally he agreed on the phone that we could pay the difference in cost of the two dresses and not the restock fee. However, when the phone was returned to an employee he reneged on that promise telling them we would have to pay the restock fee as well.

When my grandmother started speaking to other customers about what was happening, and when I mentioned that I might contact the consumer advocate at a local news station, they said we were trespassing! They never asked us to leave and actually begged us to stay through the day to speak to the manager when he arrived. We even asked them if they were asking us to leave and they said that they were not.

They wouldn't refund the money for the original dress and said that since they had the wedding date listed as May '08, and had called my daughter about the dress (calls which she never received), the dress was their property again. The venue where the wedding is being held has a contract that the wedding was only ever scheduled for this May of '09.

Only when I said that I would not call the local new station did they even allow me to pay the restock fee and difference in the prices of the 2 dresses. They even asked us why we hadn't checked up on them since we purchased the original dress to make sure they hadn't resold it and asked us why we left it there (they had told us to do so). Needless to say, we took the dress, without having it fitted, and left. As a kicker, 2 of the employees knew what was happening was wrong because they offered to subtract $50 of the restock fee from their own commission!

Rhonda

Melbourne, Florida

U.S.A.