Famous Stages Avis 2

BE VERY, VERY CAREFUL WHEN RENTING FROM THESE PEOPLE…

Without any warning, and arbitrarily, they canceled a rental order that I had placed over 2 MONTHS AGO and told me that they “didn’t want to continue doing business with me” THREE DAYS PRIOR TO MY EVENT.
I am a customer-oriented event professional and I know the importance of building good customer relations, but apparently they don’t. I have been singing and DJing at private events such as weddings, birthday parties, and corporate events for more than 10 years. Occasionally, I rent from third party vendors specific equipment that my customers want and that I don’t have. In this case I rented from Famous Stages some moving heads and uplight equipment that I needed to complete a big wedding event, only to discover, the week of the event, that they would not be able to provide me with the rental items I had reserved over two months ago.

I placed an online order on August and received a call from a representative (Veronica) letting me know that the quantity of items I had reserved exceeded their inventory (btw, the website will let you select any quantity of rental items and charge you for them when in reality their stock is very, very limited). So after some adjustments I ended up with the final order. I called them two months later, on Monday, September 18th to corroborate that they would have all the items ready for me to pick up on Friday for my event on Saturday, Sept 23rd. After about 7 to 10 minutes on the phone with a representative named Adrian, he said he couldn’t find my order in the system and that it was probably due to the fact that it was placed over 2 months ago. I got really upset and was told that a supervisor would contact me later that day.

The next day, the supervisor (Veronica) calls me and tells me that they had found the order but that out of the six moving heads I had rented they would only be able to provide me with two, and that also some other items I ordered were damaged on a previous rental and wouldn’t be available neither. All of this, with a very unapologetic and nasty attitude over the phone. I asked Veronica how they could do this to me only days away from my event but this questioning apparently infuriated her. Their solution: refund me my deposit of $244 and notify me via email that they would charge me 50% of the total value of the items ($1,95.59) if I wanted to continue with the order. A very nasty move! I immediately called them and asked to speak with a manager, so I talked to Ernesto. These were his brief words over the phone: “We have reviewed your order and decided that we no longer want to do business with you” and hung up the phone.

So, rent from them AT YOUR OWN RISK and also expect ZERO CUSTOMER SERVICE AND RELIABILITY. These people have no business ethics and should not be allowed to do business at all.

Famous Stages should change their name to Cheap-skates Lighting dot com. I'd been a long time customer of the old Cheaplights.com based in Houston, Tx for almost a decade spending thousands of dollars on gear over the years. While shopping online the other day on their website I noticed they had listed 10' AC power cords at $0 .. I thought what the heck and ordered (12) pieces as part of a larger $250+ order. When the sales team caught the mistake this guy Joe calls my cell trying to make it my problem. At first he didn't believe me when I told him the price on their own website and hung up. Then he calls back and was extremely rude saying he could not honor the order even if was their mistake. When I offered to pay for the cords at cost he told me his cost was none of my business. I canceled the entire order. Joe told me I should never order from them again. Rest assure I won't!! With a million places to buy gear why would anyone go with an outlet that doesn't care about customer service and can't keep their own pricing straight on their website?