DISCRIMINATION & HARASSMENT

I wanted to share our story with anyone who has access to the Internet. Because, NO ONE should ever feel discriminated or be harassed by anyone, because you have children.

Just recently, my husband, myself and our 10 year old daughter, visited the DirectBuy in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Most of you probably have heard of DirectBuy thru various radio talk shows or TV commercials. They claim to cut out the middle man and save you, the buyer, thousands of dollars on home improvement items. Since we are in the market looking to remodel our kitchen, we thought maybe we would give them a shot and try to save some money.

So how does DirectBuy work? It's by an appointment only at their showroom. Prior to them giving you their "visitor's pass," they have you check off this list as follows:
1) Spouse must accompany you
2) No children due to limited seating

We did the appointment via internet and therefore their receptionist called us to confirm and AGAIN, went thru their check list. She did ask us if we could make arrangements to find a babysitter for our daughter and I told her I would see if we could. Within 24 hrs of our appointment, she called us 5 times to confirm if we made other arrangements for our daughter. I told her "no." So she said, "well, for our club members we do have a children's lounge that she can sit there."

We decided to go anyway. Our 10 year old daughter is very well behaved and very much the young lady. We felt that there would be no problems, as she could share a seat with one of us if there was limited seating.

Upon our arrival, we had to sign in and the receptionist asked us to have a seat. We thought nothing of it. Within a few minutes a gentleman came over and introduced himself as the "owner" of this particular location.

At this point, we have to say, we immediately knew something wasn't right. Why would the owner have to greet us when they had a ton of other sales persons there to help us?? The second thing out of this man's mouth was, "our receptionist advised you that children were not allowed and you also told her that you would make other arrangements for your daughter." In the mean time, our daughter was sitting there quietly eating her chicken nuggets looking at him like he was a nut. We were disgusted and appalled that this man would talk to us like this at all. Extremely rude & unprofessional.

The owner then went on to say that she could go to this room and sit there. But the room is unsupervised. We could care less what they had available to us, and ready to walk out the door. We told him we didn't feel comfortable leaving our daughter in a room unsupervised. We also stated that when ever we make decisions on home improvements (ex. color of paint, color of cabinet - I like to have my daughter's opinion anyway - it's the truth!)

We also pointed out, that there was a couple a few feet away from us, that had two small children with them - one a baby and the other could not have been more than 4 or 5 years of age. He said "are you or your daughter a club member?"

After 5 whole minutes of arguing with this man, we told him that we couldn't understand why we were still sitting there arguing about where to put our daughter. His reply, "well it sounds like we aren't for you and you aren't for us - let me show you the way out."

We were so angry, and disgusted. How any professional establishment could treat a prospective customer and/or customer like he did to us, is totally beyond us. And his is the OWNER!!

We can understand when it comes to business, that having small children or unruly children around can cause some issues. But our 10 year old daughter was neither of those. If we felt there would be a problem, we would have simply canceled. They did not say it was prohibited - as they really can't.

DirectBuy claims they have "LIMITED SEATING" and this is the reason why they don't want children there. This was not the case. There were PLENTY of seats available.

What this owner did was Discriminate. His receptionist harassed us over this issue - phone call after phone call.

For those of you out there that have considered going to "DirectBuy" to save on your next home improvement - THINK AGAIN!! They are extremely unprofessional and undeserving of any one's business.

We also want to mention, that you may want to do a little research on the net - as there are many consumer complaints on DirectBuy and also Lawsuits filed from coast to coast.

See the Consumer Affairs web site: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/furniture/directbuy.html