Call Kurtis: Tile Order Still Incomplete
LODI, Calif. (CBS13) -- A Lodi homeowner says the tile store shorted her order. Call Kurtis got involved and thought it was fixed, but it turns out she's still missing tile. And now they have told her she has to pay more money if she wants it.
Not much has changed since we first met Estela Jimenez in December. Her new tile floor still isn't done. Tile is missing under the fridge, in the laundry room and in two of her bathrooms. Jimenez says after dealing with this for months, she's had enough.
"More upset," she says, "'Cause they just play with me."
Last April Jimenez bought 900 square feet of tile from Tile Outlet Always in Stock in Stockton. While laying it down, the installer noticed the order was short. Jimenez says, for months Tile Outlet promised the rest of her tile.
"They've been telling me a week, a week and a half, two weeks, two days," Jimenez told us in December.
But after we got involved, the store, whose slogan is "Always in Stock," admitted the tile was discontinued. Tile Outlet's corporate office ended up having more shipped in from Miami.
Jimenez recalls what she told the owner, "It's so funny that every single time you guys tell me it was in Ecuador, but the minute Channel 13 came in, boom, you guys find it right away in Florida."
Three more boxes of tile now sit in Jimenez's garage, but she says it's still not enough. She says the owner was confident she now had 900 square feet and told her if she wanted more tile, she would have to pay $200 to get it from Miami. So Jimenez asked for proof they fulfilled her order.
Holding the invoices, she says now she's sure she doesn't have enough. "Right here it proves how many I need."
The invoices show of the 900 square feet Jimenez originally bought, she was only given 836. The second shipment we helped her get was 50 square feet, meaning she's still 14 feet short. Without it, she'll have to rip up some of her tile in her master bathroom and pick something new.
We asked Tile Outlet corporate once again for the remaining tile, but we learned the corporate office just went out of business. So we returned to the Stockton location, which is still open. After being told "no" by one employee, the owner finally decided to order another box from Florida.
"It's going to be nice to bring my family all together and tell them 'finally,'" Jimenez says.
We asked how Jimenez was shorted not once, but again after we got involved.
Tile Outlet's corporate office told us they ordered the amount that the Stockton store owner asked for. That owner, Bill Lawton, gave us this explanation:
We get invoiced about 2 weeks after the tile gets delivered so by the time we realized the shortage our mindset was such that we had filled our order. Normally our corporate office will tell us they shorted us but they didn't this time. In any event the organization we had even up to a year ago could cope with this slip and either we source the shortage from local Tile Outlets or we get the Corporate organization to give us an ETA on the next shipment of the order. Normally the longest we wait is 4-6 weeks. No stores had this tile within 1,000 miles. Corporate told us the tile was waiting to ship from the factory in Ecuador. What we didn't know was that our corporate office was in dire trouble with its vendors and this tile never would ship. Because of the franchise rules are written our hands were tied to go our own way. Only until the last couple of weeks when we were freed from our corporate structure have we been able to operate independently and satisfy this matter.
The rest of Jimenez's tile is expected to arrive this week.