Beware The Free Estimate

We went to the Seattle Home Show this past weekend. The thing about the Home Show is that they’ve got everything, and I mean everything. So unless you enjoy being overwhelmed, you need to have a plan. This house needs a ton of things done to it before we sell, but this year we’re focusing on the outside. We’re working with a landscape designer and will be transforming this tired plot into a garden spot. With that in mind we went in looking for stone dealers and nurseries, and skipped the hot tub and vinyl siding booths. But we got suckered into signing a few info cards with the window dealers in return for a chance at $10,000 worth of free windows.

Big Mistake.

They’re all calling up asking for sales appointments. Since it’s what I do all day long I can see right through them – like Simon says: you can’t bullsh*t a bullsh*tter.

We had one company drop by last night for a “free quote”. They said it would be 60-90 minutes. It went two and a half hours. They were training a new sales guy, so we got the double team. At first it was fun because I got to play the buyer role and ask all the tough questions that I’ve been asked over the years; but when I asked him to skip certain sections (like the 15 pages of 10-year-old magazine articles), he didn’t know what to do and kept blathering. I warned him, salesman to salesman, not to talk himself out of the sale. He picked up on it and finished up and handed it over to the senior rep.

She, however, didn’t pick up on it. She proceeded to go through the entire infomercial about how great their windows are, when all we wanted was the cliff notes version and an estimate. We went through this whole process when we replaced the windows in our first home. We told her that the whiz-bang-super-duper-dope-fly-monkey windows were overkill and that we’re looking more into the mid-range stuff. So she asks to use the phone to call her manager for a price on the standard double-pane stuff. She repeats our position to the manager in a tone & wording that is designed to make us think we’re making the wrong decision. All it did was turn me off.

Turns out they only do double-pane for commercial construction, and only sell triple-pane for residential. I’m sure she knows exactly what they do and don’t do, and has pricing for it all in her little pink rollaway bag.

Then she gets into the pricing and discounting. Seriously Ron Popeil-esque, ‘but wait, there’s more…’. Another call to the manager for more discounts. I told her I wasn’t going to sign anything right there and that I wanted to look at multiple offers side-by-side, but that I’d be making the decision in the next 10 days. She just couldn’t digest that. She called the manager a third time (on our phone, not her cell phone, no less), and told him what was going on.

“…He’s being, what people commonly say is ‘stubborn’…”

She’s sitting in my kitchen, wasting my time, on my telephone, calling me names?!?!

When she hung up the phone it was all I could do to contain the outrage.

“First of all I’m looking to buy windows, not a used car, so quit calling the manager; second, I don’t appreciate being called ‘stubborn’ when, as a responsible consumer, I’m just trying to see what’s going on in the window market.” I said as she tried to backpedal, looking to shoehorn her foot from her mouth, “And the longer you stay in my house, the less likely I am to buy windows from you!”

The kid was very cool about it. She was totally rattled, and practically ran from the house. They sat in our driveway for about 20 minutes talking before they finally split. I’m sure she thinks she lost the sale. We priced it out this morning against what we paid at the old house, and she’s right, they’re more than double what we paid even when inflation is accounted for.

When you go looking for windows, beware the “free estimate”. Time is money; they are anything but free.