An Expensive Floor Cleaning

To understand my afternoon, I have to supply a small, seemingly meaningless event from yesterday. I got a phone call during the afternoon, ostensibly from a “cleaning service”, that had done a random drawing and our address had come up to do a word of mouth ad campaign. We were to get a free demo of their services where they would actually clean a floor for us. I figured since it was someone else doing the cleaning, and it was “free”, I’d give it a shot.

Come 1 o’clock this afternoon, they cleaners arrived. My hope was that they’d be in and out within half-an-hour, 45 minutes tops. But when they got inside the house, I realized that I had been suckered. The devil was in the details.

You see, the outfit who called me does in fact sell a “cleaning service.” It’s just not what the average Joe or Jane would consider a cleaning service. They sell Kirby vacuum cleaners. Only (as I found out over the next 3 hours) it’s so much more than a vacumm cleaner. It’s an upholstery cleaner, and a carpet shampooer and a mattress cleaner and an electronics cleaner and a blower for inflating mattresses all rolled into one wonderful machine.

From a product standpoint, the demo is impressive. It’s clearly a well thought out and designed machine. It pulled more dirt off our floors and carpets than our current central vac setup. In fact, it was so good at it that I asked them to just clean a single spot because I was trying to figure out if the machine was actually cleaning or just recycling crap from a hidden chamber. Alas, it was legit.

The problem came when the actual cleaning portion of the program finally arrived. They shampooed one of the carpets and then asked me if I wanted to buy the thing for $2500. I told them it was an impressive machine, but I couldn’t justify paying that much money for it. Even though it clearly did a superior job, it wasn’t worth that much more to me.

Then I made 2 big mistakes by answering 2 of their questions. The first was, what would a like for a trade in on the current vacuum? The second question was, what would it take to make me interested in actually buying it?

I’m not a natural jerk, but I really wish I could have been at that moment. It would have saved me at least another hour worth of time. But rather than tell them to just get out, I gave them reasonable answers to their questions, at which point they called their “boss” who told them to give me everything I asked for the trade in value on my current vacuum. I was … shocked.

But I still wasn’t buying and told them so. So they got back on the phone and their boss dropped the price of the vacuum to $1500. Now, we were firmly into sleazy salesman territory. It’s one thing to peddle a quality product at a high price. It’s another thing entirely to then drop the price of the product by $1000 just to make a sale. Plus, the whole contact the boss thing gave the affair a distinctive car-salesman-tactics flavor. The only thing more they needed was some bad coffee.

So I finally told them “NO” in no uncertain terms. Even telling them that, at this point, I wasn’t really sure what the vacuum was worth since they seemed willing to give it to me at any price. They finished cleaning the floors and, to their credit, didn’t try to push me any further on the sale and didn’t show any kind of animosity. They packed up and were gone by 4:30. My entire afternoon was shot, just like that.

But at least the floors were clean…