Complaint Review: Unifirst - Mcallen Nationwide

The arbitrator found that Unifirst had willfully and knowingly defrauded my company and awarded us treble damages.

We signed a contract with Unifirst in 2014.  As we went back and audited the account we found it was violated from week 1.  Because of this it was our conclusion they never intended to honor their agreement. The arbitrator found that Unifirst had willfully and knowingly defrauded my company and awarded us treble damages.

In our case when we I initially raised the issue and started getting my information together Unifirst did not come running to resolve the problem.  I sent my certified letter and quite a while past and I continued to ask very pointed questions until a manager finally agreed to give a partial credit and I asked how did he come up with that number and asked for an accounting.  What I learned from this was that he just pulled the number from thin air because when I wanted to tie it down they could not. I was told there would be no further credit and I said you owe me several thousand dollars let's arbitrate it and sent a certified letter.  After 3 months Unifirst stopped serving our account. It was bizarre on 3-1-2016 they failed to show first time in our whole contract. When we called they stated the rep had come and I was not there and he talked to my warehouse staff Alan.  Alan said he did not come by nor did our cameras see him come by. The next week the manager came to my office and asked if we were ready for service and he advised the man will be there in 10 minutes if we were ready.  I told him we were ready then he said well you need to pay your bill and I pointed out we have a credit and we did not ever see Unifirst again.  

Interestingly we did receive a letter stating we were in default for canceling our agreement early and owed 30k plus.  Ironically this letter also failed to follow the pricing in the agreement. At this point I was surprised at how cavalier they were with trying to continue this fraud.  I remember when I went to my attorney with this case and he was like this is going to cost you 15k to do this.  I told him I do not care. Several times prior to arbitration Unifirst wanted to settle with a walk away but I new we would win.  

The amount of work it takes to understand unifirst billing is significant.  What I can say is in my opinion our experience does not appear to be an isolated circumstance.  The reason I believe this is other postings on line and the nuances of the agreement.  Items like you must arbitrate in the capital city of your state. Not only do they avoid class action litigation but they force anyone not in the capital city to travel and that means most small businesses cannot afford the cost to have their attorney travel.  

In our case what we found was Unifirst overbilled in many ways.

1. The rate charged for lost garments of all types failed to meet the contract.

2. Failure to give notice of price increases as required by the agreement.

3. Failure to limit price increases to the contracted percentage annually per agreement.

4. Charging greater than contracted  GMP  amount.

5. Charging greater setup charges than contracted.

6. Failure to meet their service agreement per contract.

7. Charging service fees for product not delivered.

8. Charging for lost clothing when it was not lost.

9. Telling workers they could change Uniforms and it cost nothing but then billing company for the same changes.

10. Failure to remove staff after they were terminated or in their vernacular PDE.

11. Churning the account with small changes triggering a lost garment charge. This is caused by Unifirst having a default for any anomaly defaulting to lost garment.

12. By breaking down each bill we could show how the rep isolated the changes to the end of the period.

13. It was crazy the lengths Unifirst went to one example was the driver came to me and a warehouse person asking us to rate him as a delivery person.  When this form was filled out it had no explanation and my warehouse staff liked the rep and as he said hooked him up.  When they asked me to sign the same document I addressed the problems we were having with Unifirst and how the rep had handled a difficult situation and rated him a four out of five with a clear explanation it was limited to him.  When Unifirst attorney provided the exhibits it was clear that what had happen was the Rep had folded over the printing on the form that stated we were ranking Unifirst total experience. The other part that showed the truth in our case were the dates. Unifirst filed under oath an exhibit stating I gave them a positive rating 3 months after the testified they came to our location and stopped serving our business.

14. I read online I think it was Glass Ceiling where Unifirst trains their reps to talk about something of interest be it cars, football… to take the customer's attention away from the bill. That's certainly what they did at our facility.

15. In Arbitration we learned why the rep doing all this stuff.  He gets paid a commission of 7% of rout value.  

If you're still contemplating an agreement with Unifirst or any company make sure you agreement specifies who can add any cost for anything to your bill.  We were lucky but many are not and unifirst staff will find anyone to sign their delivery ticket and unlike most delivery tickets theirs is a PO to purchase the items on the paper and all services rendered.  They try to use vague language like a manager and then argue that person is management.  Specify a certain people to close out that leak.

Its pretty rare you get treble damages.  My attorney did an outstanding job taking a very convoluted billing system and making it easy for the arbitrator to understand. I went ahead and created a spreadsheet of what the bills should have been week by week at the contracted rates.  We went to our Arbitration prepared and we received the the $34k because we were prepared. My attorneys name is Chris Brasure his office phone is (956) 686-3555.

The Unifirst contract does not make it easy but I do think if you are experiencing what we did with Unifirst than I do think there is a remedy.  If you are contemplating doing business with Unifirst hopefully you learn from our experience and can make the right decision for you.