Utter Garbage!!! (MFI)

Name: Pingu

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Product:	MFI
Date:	23/03/05 (1657 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Crap stuff, Rude staff

I would never normally even think about buying MFI, simply because of their prices. I'm more of an IKEA person - cheap, but reasonable quality. I had always made the mistake of assuming, where furniture is concerned, that you get what you pay for. Thus I was under the impression that MFI, should it ever be within the reach of my wallet, would be superb, since their prices are simply astronomical.

Such an opportunity presented itself just after Christmas. We had just moved house, making a certain amount of capital, and MFI were having a sale. There was a wardrobe that seemed ideal. It fit in the gap where we wanted a wardrobe, down to the last centimetre, and had been reduced from about £600 to £200. I made the mistake of believing that a wardrobe that should have cost £600 must be a seriously OK wardorbe, and that I would be getting quite a deal. They also had matching bedside cabinets reduced from £150 to £50, so I thought I would get them at the same time.

The first disappointment was customer service. When I finally managed to get someone to pay any attention to me she was incredibly condescending, rude, abrupt, etc. I think she believed we weren't in the right social bracket to be buying from MFI, or maybe it was just beneath her to be doing something as menial as serving. Which is a shame, because it then turned out she was not only rude, but also highly incompetent. Not only was she not above serving, but actually she wasn't up to it. She stuffed up the VISA transaction twice, and managed to get the wardrobe on a totally seperate delivery from the bedside cabinets, meaning two separate days of waiting in; not only that but the delivery wasn't for several weeks.

The next disappointment was the deliveries. You are only allowed to find out on the day of delivery whether your stuff has been consigned to the morning delivery or the afternoon one. So don't count on being able to plan around it. Not only that, but it turns out that their definition of morning includes 6pm. So I did, in the end, have to spend two entire days waiting in.

When it came to building the stuff I'm afraid I nearly resorted to a whole string of words that I didn't realise I knew. The parts are invariably poorly machined; holes intended for screws and dowels are put in the wrong place, and often drilled at an angle; holes intended for other parts to fit into are never deep enough, and also in the wrong place. I was short of every type of screw. They also only use so many generic screws, which often aren't suited to some of the jobs they assign them to. For instance, the screws which they said to use to screw on the top of the wardrobe were about 5mm too long and came straight out of the top. The overall design sucks - for instance it is impossible to build the wardrobe square, since the top piece protrudes, making it impossible to lie the wardrobe flat whilst nailing the back on (which is the stage that finalises the shape). And don't even get me started on the instructions. I've built several hundred flatpack items and pieces of exercise equipment in my time, from IKEA, Argos, and just about everywhere else. Never have I come across instructions that were so poorly written as MFI's. They are utter gibberish.

Quite frankly MFI are crap. Their stuff is very, very, very highly priced - to the point where you could almost be buying solid wooden furniture - but is actually of much lower quality than the cheap stuff at Argos. If I had bought a £150 wardrobe at IKEA it would have been much higher in quality, much better machined and finished, with useful instructions, and I wouldn't have had to wait weeks for it. MFI is a wannabe shop trying to pose as slightly upper class. Avoid at all costs.

Summary: