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Review content:
This review is for their wash & fold service.
I moved to NYC last December, and quickly found out that my neighborhood is completely devoid of laundromats (Midtown East - if you know of any please message me!). So we (my sister/roommate and I) conceded to send our laundry out. We had decided on Alpian's because of their glowing dry cleaning reviews. Although it was the most expensive, it also had the best reputation on Yelp & CitySearch. So we started our service in January, and have been regularly sending our laundry out since then. That is, until the last couple of months of increasingly poor service, leading up to our decision to terminate our accounts with Alpians.
The worst of the many incidents happened about a week ago, when I called on Thursday to schedule a drop-off of my laundry. I was informed that it was ready, and could be delivered any time. I specified 2pm that day, because that was the first time I could get away from my office to come home and meet the deliveryman (we live in a walkup). Sure enough, I arrive home at 1:50, wait around for 25 minutes with no sign of a delivery. So I call Alpians, and the woman who answers the phone (who is new, and apparently somewhat mentally challenged, to put it mildly), tells me to ""hold on,"" puts the phone on the desk, at which point I can hear her call for the deliveryman to whom she says, ""I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you, this lady's laundry was supposed to be delivered at 2:00."" After a couple of mumbled sentences (all of which I'm privy to as a result of her inability to operate the ""hold"" button), she returns to inform me that the deliveryman is ""on his lunch break"" and how long would I be at the apartment. I told her, once again, that I only left the office to meet him, so I'd only be around until he showed up. She said ""ok 5 minutes.""
Surpise surprise, 15 minutes later and still no word from her. So I call back, ask to speak to her supervisor, who again tells me that he just left and that it would only be ""another 5 minutes."" 15 minutes later, a total of about two hours gone from my office, and the deliveryman finally shows.
The only explanation in the degradation of service has to be a change in management - in fact, when discussing the declining quality of service with our deliveryman, he shared with us the fact that having just returned from a few days off due to an injury sustained while on the job, the manager (apparently a female) was refusing to pay him for his days off and would be terminating his employment due to his absences. Granted, this could just be the ramblings of a disgruntled employee, but then he proceeded to inform me that Omar, the ONLY decent employee with any type of work ethic or communication skills, had already put in his notice.
This news, following a series of unbelievable customer service nightmares, culminated today with a phone call from Alpains, after calling to have my laundry picked up, with a notification that the price per pound would be increasing from $1.25 to $2.35 per pound. That's almost a 100% increase! Already considering terminating my relationship with them, I politely told the woman who called to cancel my account. After we hung up, I realized that the highest rate any laundry service charges anywhere in Manhattan is $1.25, so an increase of this magnitude could only mean they were trying to drive their wash & fold customers away.
Suffice it to say, with business practices as shady as these, I wouldn't recommend doing business with Alpians under any circumstances - not unless you're comfortable with dishonesty, lack of dependability, and lackluster service. Your money would be better spent buying a new wardrobe - because at $2.35/lb, you'd be doing so anyway every couple of months.
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