Saturday, July 26, 2014

Buyer Beware

     Everyone has heard the term "you get what you pay for". In my case recently, and a few others, you don't get what you paid for.

    This post is to warn others about a clothing scam that happened, and my side of things.


              PLEASE MUM, PLEASE DON'T
     A friend found a most awesome 3 season jacket on a clothing site where she made a previous purchase. I fell in love, and saw other things that I liked. Stuff was 70-90% off, which doesn't seem unusual for a website. If you ordered $75 of stuff, you would receive free shipping. Not bad..I went to some moms I knew and asked if they needed anything. We had a purchase set up.

     Before money changed hands, I Googled the company (because I had never heard of it) and found out that many stores had closed and went bankrupt. Them, having a website still made sense to me. Some companies bounce back without that being in the news, some sell off their stock online. Apparently, this was not the case.

     July 18th, 2014, I made a PayPal payment. Money left my bank account and went into World Shake Productions account. In a week, I had not received a "we mailed your stuff" email. Their website said "temporarily unavailable". I tried to call all their numbers and none were in service. I sent emails, nothing. I was not impressed, and starting to get worried. I tried calling and their website daily.
I Googled "PLEASE MUM TOOK MY MONEY" and that lead me to a Facebook group about boycotting PLEASE MUM. There was a post about how it happened to another mother. More people commented. The same week, I had placed an order and their site was down, the same week the other women did too. They all tried everything I tried. PLEASE MUM had also taken down all their social media information, as well as taking everyone's payments.

     PayPal dispute filed. 45 days.from payment, I hope to get our money back (Aug 14).


      Why is this post important? The owner has apparently done this before. After this happened, I looked into it.
     From now on, I will fully look into a company if I'd never heard about it, even if recommended by friends. In all fairness, it's not like a normal person would look into Wal-Mart/Target/etc. Yet, I still feel dumb.

7 comments:

  1. wow I'm surprised to hear that ! Please Mum was a big deal and was in just about every mall at one time

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    1. I had never heard about it before placing this order

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  2. I used to work for please mum. The owner is a drunk. She would go on wine tours and then do inspections of the local area stores completely hosed. She hired district managers who knew nothing about children's clothes to come in and instruct us on how to make her clothing sell better. She was always changing the quality and the fashion, parents were constantly returning things that would fall apart in less than a week, or they would come in and openly laugh at the clothes in the stores. Whenever we got a shipment in, the clothes reeked of chemicals and felt damp from being over processed. She shut down stores with no warning, locking the employees out and taking MONTHS to finally pay them. She ran that company into the ground, high on her own sense of self entitlement and fame. What started as a beautiful concept for affordable quality kids clothes went up in flames as a consumers worst nightmare. Good Riddance, Please Mum.

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    1. Oh yikes! I hope she doesn't start up something else.

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  3. So very True except employees only got pennies on the $ that they were owed after Lawyers fought for almost a year for that pittance of payment. I was owed 2 weeks of full time pay plus 2 weeks vacation pay from my holidays that I had booked months before that were booked for the week after She locked us out. I was also owed severance for 4 years. The lawyer figured it out to almost $3000 and I got $134. I hope for everyone's sake this woman is never allowed to own another company in her name or any one elses name. She is a horrible person.

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    1. Oh no. That is definitely not fair to the employees at all. I am sorry that happened to you.

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  4. To be fair when it comes to serverance owed to employees that is out of the companies hands and has to do with the laws that changed many years ago under the BC Liberals (Gordo Campbell). I worked for a company that went bankrupt and basically as an employee you are a unsecured creditor which means you are at the bottom of the pile and secured creditors (banks with insurance) get paid first. Thank the Liberals for changing the laws and protecting the big guys while shafting employees.

    However, if you actually worked for an employer with descency then they know they are going down and should try to pay out employees before locking the door but these days they try to filter out money for themselves before locking the doors.

    Thankfully I had placed an order during this 'last' sale and got my order days before the website was taken down. I've been buying clothes from them for a few years online and have never had any problems so don't feel like you were duped or it was a scam. It was just unfortunate that they didn't fulfill all orders before locking the doors to bankruptcy.

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