Call Kurtis: Taken to the Cleaners?

An Antelope dry cleaner is facing several complaints it damaged or lost customers' clothes, and has done nothing to compensate them.

Rick Richardson of Roseville is one of those customers. He says he was lied to and given the runaround after Fresh and Save Cleaners lost his clothes.

It's been weeks since Rick dropped off his clothes, including four pairs of pants, five shirts and two sport coats. He's still missing two pairs of pants and one shirt.

At first he was told they weren't ready. On his third trip back, Rick says the truth came out. "'we don't know where they are, maybe they're in the store somewhere'," he says they told him. "I said 'What do you mean you don't know where they are? Where are my clothes?'"

Rick says the clothes he did get back were wrinkled and creased. And one pair of pants wasn't even his. "I tried them on it was two sizes too big, and I lost it at that point," Richardson says.

He figured he was out almost $150 for his missing clothes. He called, wrote letters and went to the Antelope store. But reaching a manager was like being stuck on spin cycle.

"They could have just come out and said 'Hey, we lost your clothes, and this is what we're going to do to make it right'," Richardson says. "They didn't do that."

We stepped in and tracked down a manager at Fresh and Save Cleaners. He says nobody knows what happened to Rick's clothes. After we called him, the manager called Rick agreed to pay him $72.50 for the missing pants and shirt. That's ten times the cost of the dry cleaning bill for those three items.

Rick was satisfied with what he got, but there's a formula consumers can use if their clothes are lost or damaged. It's found in a document called the International Fair Claims Guide for Consumer Textiles Products. The guide uses the item's life expectancy, age and condition to determine a fair replacement cost.

There is no state agency that regulates dry cleaners, but complaints can be filed with the Better Business Bureau. Fresh and Save Cleaners has an "F" rating with the BBB, including complaints from two other customers over damaged clothes