Dry Cleaner By Val

Doing business with The Dry Cleaner by Val was one of the worst customer service experiences my wife and I have ever been through. We had a house fire and lost a great deal of our belongings. Two adjusters, the cleaning company, and The Dry Cleaner by Val were at our house the following day. We never called The Dry Cleaner by Val, so we had no idea how they entered the scene. They bagged *everything* they could get their hands on. Most of these garments were beyond restorable, but they took them anyway. The representative called us the following day to schedule the delivery of our priority items. I asked who referred us to them. She got quiet for a moment and stuttered, “Well, uhhh, we really don’t have that information. I asked, “OK, so someone called you to let you know that we had a house fire, gave you all of our personal information, including our insurance information, and you have no record of who provided this to you?” I don’t believe that for a second. Why the secrecy? They offered us storage, so we asked for a few months time frame. I called them back 2 weeks later to ask for a receipt. The girl said, “Well, you can get that through your insurance company.” I said, “I can get it from you, too. Why make me work harder at this?” Two days later I still didn’t have an invoice. I called them back. She said some of our things were not itemized, so she didn’t have the bill ready. Once they had everything itemized, in another day or so, she’d send it to me. OK, so a week passed by and I still didn’t have it. I called back. I finally got the email the following day, but it wasn’t an invoice! It was a breakdown of our items with zeros on each line. I gave them another call back. They wanted to know the reason why we wanted to see the receipt. How about because it’s our right! What’s the matter with you people?! About a month went by when my wife received a call from the dry cleaners about some clothes in question. They called her with a list of garments to discuss. My wife stopped the girl and asked why she was calling about these items a month later. She said that those items were put aside to ask us about them before cleaning them, but the rest of our clothes were clean. Our clothes have been sitting there from fire and soot damage for over a month without cleaning them? A few weeks went by before we spoke with the dry cleaners again. I asked the representative if my wife and I could visit the facility where our clothing was being stored. Instead of offering me a day and time to visit them, she offered to send a driver to our hotel with the delivery. I said we really didn’t know exactly what we needed, so we’d prefer to look through our things instead. She hesitated and asked if Tuesday would be fine. That wasn’t for another six days! I said that was not going to work for us. She said the earliest would be Monday. She also said that some of our leather jackets and boots were not ready yet. Whoa, you *still* don’t have all of our clothes cleaned after all this time?! Tuesday made perfect sense to me. They needed a week’s time to clean the rest of our clothing that was just sitting there in storage, still dirty and smelly! It turned out they “accidentally” charged for clothing that was marked as non-restorable. Our dry cleaning bill was over what we anticipated, by the thousands, actually. A lot of the clothing they “restored” came back to us still smelling like smoke, a lot of my wife’s clothing had shrunk, and our custom-made curtains came back a few inches shorter. They said that since we signed the waiver form, they were not liable for it. Any company who throws the “too bad you signed our waiver form” into the conversation, without even apologizing for the matter, isn’t a company worth doing business with. In the end, they finally offered to stretch them out for us, but we didn’t want to deal with The Dry Cleaner by Val any longer than we already had to.