| Service Master |
| Lied about condition of items following fire, with apparent intention to re-sell |
| 26th of Jun, 2012 by kayhil |
We experienced a major housefire in 2009 and our insurance company paid for a salvage company to assist with the clean up and pack out -- we had a choice of Serve Pro or Service Master. We had no real recommendations to go on, but the mother of one of our neighbors had until recently been the owner of the local Service Master franchise (and had just sold it to retire), so we picked them hoping that small "connection" might mean we'd get good service from them. Instead, it was a terrible experience: they lied about the condition of items that had been in the house, telling us they couldn't be salvaged and that our insurance company would have to replace them, only to come back at night and retrieve the same items from the dumpster in order to re-sell them. (Example: they told us all our electronics and computer equipment, while perhaps still working at the moment, would soon disintegrate internally and fail completely and that unless we wanted that to happen AFTER our insurance claim was settled we should toss them now. Dazed and confused from what we'd been through, we did what they advised, only to find afterward that the same employees were coming back at night -- with full knowledge of the new franchise owner -- to get those electronics. Same thing with our kids toys -- "we won't be able to get the smell of smoke out of an American Girl doll" only to find the employees were either giving them to their own kids or selling them. It's hard to know if this was the sketchy behavior of a single franchise or if this is part of the overall business model -- i.e. stick it to the insurance company twice, first by billing them for the salvage, then by lying to the homeowner about what "can" be salvaged then re-sell it on eBay to help boost profit margins, and so what if the insurance company has to pay for it to be replaced?
Some stuff they took away to salvage and/or clean simply never came back, although in their sales pitch they had told us "anyway we determine we cannot salvage, we will bring back to you and let you see it before it is disposed of." Total fiction! When we would say things like "What about our down pillows, including the ones in the linen closet and inside pillow shams -- what happened to them? What was the exact count of them so we can let the insurance company know how many we need to replace?" they could not produce them or any record of them.
Of the stuff Service Master did "salvage" much of it came back ruined -- not from damage by the fire, but from the actual cleaning process. Other stuff came back broken and carefully reglued -- such as china that had been pristine when packed up -- but they never mentioned this self-inflicted damage. And the boxes we got back post-fire were totally jumbled up -- we might find a single shoe in a box of something unrelated, then fifty boxes later find the other shoe with other, still unrelated items. After our home was rebuilt, we sold it and moved out of state, and there are a handful of things we are still unpacking for the first time since the fire, and Service Master is still screwing us over -- we unpacked our hammock today, for example, still in the plastic shrink wrap they'd sent it back in -- only to find it missing all its hardware.
And then of course, there were the things they "returned" to us that were not ours -- lamps, oriental rugs, suitcases, other stuff that we'd never seen before -- which made me wonder which, if any, of our missing items were simply given to the wrong family and not to us.
Last but not least, there was the bill they sent to our insurance agency -- tens of thousands of dollars, including charges for some services that were never performed. I was asked to review it and told the insurance company what was real and what was padding. But really, Service Master? You did a terrible job AND then overbilled for it?
I have no idea if other companies like Serve Pro are different or better. I have no idea if our experience was common, or unique. All I know is that it was so terrible and so creepy to have these individuals from Service Master handling all our worldly possessions -- stealing them, ruining them, breaking them and losing them -- that I could never, ever recommend their salvage operation or any of their other business operations.
I'd really like to hear from other people who have been through fires or other disaster clean up with them to know what the experience was like. |
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