mfi - made for idiots - sold by idiots (MFI)

Member Name: abbiejordan

Product:	MFI
Date:	31/05/02 (2782 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good quality kitchen furniture, price, treatment by head office

Disadvantages: poor service from store staff, no specialist knowledge of sales assistant, time taken to sort problems out

When looking to buy our first kitchen, we visited several stores that designed and sold kitchens, including MFI. Being a bit green to the whole idea of planning a kitchen, my boyfriend and I sat down with a number of design people and asked for help in designing the kitchen in addition to the important task of calculating the price. In the end we settled with MFI, which although was not the cheapest option, was substantially cheaper than a number of other companies we visited.

We visited MFI a number of times to amend our plans as we changed our mind about various things (indecisive I know!) and each time they amended our plans on the computer and printed us out copies of the new plans. A good point to mention is that MFI allowed us to haggle about the price of the appliances we bought from them agreeing to match prices that I had got from various internet companies which were cheaper than theirs. We eventually bought from our kitchen from them at the end of January 2002 and were a little disappointed to be told that the kitchen could not be delivered until the end of March (as we had previously been told that it would not take this long). However, the next day we noticed on the invoice that the assistant had made a mistake and not upgraded something we had requested. My boyfriend went into the store and they agreed to upgrade it for free (as the salesman had said that he had when he had not). We sat back and waited for two months for our kitchen to be delivered.

On the delivery day, the kitchen was delivered in the agreed time slot. However, my boyfriend (who had taken the day off work) noticed that several things were missing and a few articles were broken. The most obvious mistake was that there were not enough lengths of worktop to cover the number of units we had ordered. My other half checked the original order and found that the sales assistant had not ordered enough worktop - not quite sure how he had managed this as he drew the o
riginal plans! After several calls to the store to report this in addition to some scratched units, my boyfriend was promised that we would receive a new length of worktop free in a few weeks. I was not happy about this as we had arranged for a kitchen fitter to come the next week to fit the kitchen and we didn?t have a full kitchen for him to fit. In the end, the store agreed to get one to us sooner and replace the scratched units. As the kitchen fitter began his job, we noticed that MFI had made many other mistakes, eg omitted to order end strips for the worktop and had not included the filter for the extractor fan as promised. After several phone calls and visits to the store, these mistakes (and others) were rectified, but most of them were caused by the sales assistant not ordering all of the relevant parts. In addition to this, the omitted filter that they sent was the wrong one, and we had to request that another 'correct' filter was issue to us.

As we had spent such a lot of money with them, I sent a letter to the head office of MFI outlining all of the mistakes that they had made and the level of poor service that we had received (ie phone calls that were never returned). I was amazed to find that someone from head office phoned me on the day they received my letter to say that they would investigate my complaint and report back to me by the end of the week. I was a little sceptical, but at the end of the week I received a phone call from the same woman, apologising for the service we had received, offering a partial explanation of some of the issue I had raised and offering a one hundred pound good will gesture. I was pleasantly surprised by the quick and efficient way in which they dealt with my complaint.

Would I recommend MFI? The furniture is actually good quality for what you pay for. If we had gone to one of the more expensive companies, I am sure that we could not have experienced all of these problems, but we
would have had to part with a great deal more money - so you get what you pay for. I am really pleased with the kitchen now that it is all fitted. In their defence, it seems that many of the scratched units were scratched in transit, which is not the actual fault of MFI, but as a customer I don't actually care whose fault it is. The service from members of the store could definitely be improved, as many times no one answered the phone and many promised calls were never returned to me. One good point was the haggling of prices regarding appliances, it was certainly easier than buying these from separate internet based companies.

If you do decide to buy from MFI, please do not be surprised if you encounter various problems with your goods and/or service. However, if you do experience such problems, I would recommend actually going to the store to sort them out (more effective than on the phone) and also writing to head office if your complaint cannot be dealt with at store level (worked for us anyway).

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