Miss Kitty, I am both appalled and furious at the way you have been treated by this company which seems to have forgotten its beginnings. How they have the audacity to do this to you when it is their ****** ridiculously tardy and shambolic refunds 'system' to blame for your cancelled order simply beggars belief. This is a classic case of a company tasting success and then rapidly dropping its stated ethics and promise of first-class customer service. All this from a man who wanted us to believe in his so-called integrity and his assurances that the customer was key to his business.
As Argey said, the Bennetts are now happy to drop the very customers they initially relied upon to get the company off the ground and to spread the word to friends and family and ensure new buyers came onboard. What a shoddy way to treat the people who were willing to put their trust and money into a business and help it find its feet in a competitive market.
It seems to me that Steve Bennett now has a very short-term view about the running of the company, and that, I feel, could well be his undoing. It's a naive policy to disregard long-standing customers and concentrate solely on attracting new ones, since it's only a matter of time before the 'newbies', as it were, cotton on to the workings of Gems/Rocks and spread the word to their friends and families. Word of mouth works both ways; it can enhance success, or it can set in motion changes leading ultimately to the failure of a business venture. Frankly, at a time of world-wide recession, it isn't a good idea to arrogantly believe that tomorrow will be as good as today, and the money will keep rolling in. I should imagine that a lot of customers walk away when they realise the reality of the oft-spouted "No quibble 30 day mbg", especially when the presenters omit to mention just how long people will be waiting for their money to be returned.
It strikes me that the end of Chat heralded a new era over at Rocks, and made it much easier for changes to be made that benefited the company, but more or less stuck two fingers up at loyal customers. It meant that presenters could get away with more or less anything, that there could be a never-ending 'clearance' where prices often seemed to go surprisingly higher than they had in non-clearance times, and new customers would be none the wiser. A way of keeping people ignorant and ensuring that discontent would henceforth wave its irritating and inconvenient hands behind the scenes. Oh, and on this forum, and thankfully on here we have the freedom to question the integrity of a company that is happy to disregard and discard customers in such an atrocious manner.
Has Steve Bennett never heard the maxim about being careful how you treat people on the way up, since they are the very people you will meet on the way down? Perhaps he could look it up in some book or other just after he peruses a dictionary for the meaning of the words integrity, loyalty, clearance, sale, rare, recession, ethics, and my personal favourites, genuine, reverse, auction...
ffice
