Bassett Furniture Industries

I purchased a dining room table and chairs at Bassett Furniture in Ft. Lauderdale in February 2009. After about 2 months of shopping for the furniture, I was so happy that my wife and I found something that we both loved. We took advantage of the 6 months same as cash and made the purchase.

We were told by the salesperson that it would take about 2-3 weeks to take delivery of the furniture. The furniture did not arrive at the Bassett Furniture warehouse in West Palm Beach until about 5 weeks after we made the purchase. It then took one week to have the furniture delivered from the West Palm Beach warehouse to Hollywood (2/18/09). When the furniture arrived, I noticed several problems as the delivery men were moving the furniture into my dining room:

• One of chairs had a fractured leg.
• One end of the table top had deep dents running along the entire edge.
• There were brush hairs dried into the varnish on one of the chairs.
• The finish on the table top was extremely blotchy on one side of the table.
• There were many extremely sharp burred edges on the table…some edges were smooth while the same edges on the opposite side of the table were very sharp. One of the reasons that we liked this table so much in the showroom was because the table was kid friendly, as all of the edges were rounded and smooth.

The delivery men encouraged me to take delivery of the furniture and said that Bassett would send out a technician to make the repairs. The technician was scheduled to come to my house 9 days after delivery. When I inquired as to scheduling an earlier date, Bassett said that it was not possible. I was told that the technician would call the day before in order to schedule a time window (technician should have called me on Thursday 2/26/09). Well I was at my son’s school for a holiday performance on Friday, 2/27/09, when I received the call from the technician. He was standing on my front door step waiting for me to answer the door and I told him that I was not currently available. I asked if he could stop by later in the day. He said that he would have to reschedule for the following week.

The way I saw this playing out was that the technician would show up the following week, he would determine that 2 of the chairs and the table top would have to re-fabricated (4 weeks), the new parts would have to be shipped to the WPB warehouse, one week for delivery from WPB to Hollywood, and then one week to schedule a visit from the technician. I was not willing to wait the additional 7 weeks to resolve the problem.

I finally called Bassett Furniture to request a full return and refund. Bassett informed me that there would be a 30% restocking fee. After debating this issue, they finally agreed to waive the restocking fee but they insisted on still charging me for delivery. I disputed the delivery charge of $136.74 and the credit company sided with Bassett Furniture. I do not understand why I have to pay the delivery charge if I did not buy anything from Bassett Furniture.