I called Stevenson out in the middle of the night after my AC went out in 100 degree heat. They said it would be $80 for the call, but I had a $30 coupon. The tech checked the AC unit and after less than 5 minutes told me it had a bad capacitor. He said he had one out in the truck, but it was $376 total. That means the part would be $326 when you subtract the $50 service call. Well, I told him I only had a little over $300 and I couldn't pay that much. He messed around with his phone and papers for a minute and then told me he could do it for $306 total. That means the part would then cost $256. Since I could now afford the repair, I had no other choice but to either suffer in the extreme heat the next morning and leave my animals in the house to possibly overheat and die, or pay for the repair. It took him literally less than 5 minutes to install the part, and the AC was working again.
The only problem I had with this was discovering that I had literally just been robbed. I took the old capacitor into the house and searched for it on Google. I found that at least 20+ places had this same capacitor for $25 and shipping was less than $10 on all of them. Yes they were brand new parts.
I became livid that this place charged me TEN TIMES the cost of the part, basically taking advantage of me because of the situation I was in. Yes, I was given a discount but this call should have been $150 tops. I wouldn't mind being charged two or even three times what the part costs because I understand they have to make a profit, but TEN TIMES?
After that, I started receiving phone calls from Stevenson and guess what? They wanted MORE money!! They wanted me to sign up for their maintenance plan for over $30 a month. I told the girl on the phone to stop calling me about that unless they decided they wanted to do something about the fact that I was charged $256 for a $25 part. Then she was quick to get off the phone.
A few days later, another call. This time it was offering a $69 furnace check for the upcoming Fall/Winter seasons. Again, I told the girl to take me off their calling list because I was so disgusted with them for ripping me off that I would never call them for anything else again. I told her that it would be nice if a supervisor or someone would address the issue. She said she would have one call me back, and guess what? They never did.
The tech was friendly and knew what he was doing, and he got my AC working again. For that, I am thankful. However, charging $256 for a $25 part is something that I'm not willing to swallow. I will never use this company again until they address this problem, and I will be posting this review online everywhere, so that other customers know what to watch for and don't get ripped off.
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