I would say I had an interesting experience furniture shopping at Ashley’s Furniture Home Store. It ended up being successful and we purchased a lot of Tré’s apartment furniture on our trips, they truly do have quality furniture for low prices so I give them their props for that. My issue with the experience was that they way the salespeople handled things, some things just didn’t sit right with me.
We had went to Ashley’s Furniture on 3 different occasions, our first trip was very pleasant and the woman we worked with seemed to be very helpful and easy to work with, but we soon came to find out that wasn’t the case. On our first visit we had scouted out all of the pieces Tré was interested in buying: a bedroom set, a couch set, and a dining room set. Tré was only able to afford the bedroom set at the time. He came in with the intention of utilizing Ashley’s financing with Synchrony. He applied for the credit line and used this to purchase his bedroom set along with a mattress and boxsprings. The next day we get a call from Synchrony asking to confirm our account. We returned the call and was shocked as we had learned that Tré had signed up for an Ashley’s Furniture Credit Card which was going to be sent to his house. Now Tré and I are both knowledgeable on credit and usually we wouldn’t be fooled with these type of things, but the way the saleswoman described it it seemed like a furniture version of AfterPay (if you aren’t familiar AfterPay is a company that allows biweekly payments for various online stores), we had no idea we signed up for a credit card, which could have easily been communicated. It just overall gave me a really shady vibe like the women was trying to get over on two young black adults in tricking them into signing up for a credit card and getting in debt.
The next visit, we went just to double check if we wanted to purchase the couch set. The original saleswoman that we had worked with wasn’t working at the time but we made sure to express our feelings on the last occasion to the man who was working with us. We moved on and decided we wanted to purchase the couch and this time we used a different financing company, know having the knowledge we had we were comfortable with signing up again. It was advertised that you could pay it off in 12 months. We had retuned home satisfied again with another purchase.
The very last visit we came to purchase the dining set, this time Tré planned on paying in cash so no financing was needed. The manager was there this time and he started to fully explain to us the financing plan that we had used the last visit. He had emphasized that we should pay it off within 3 months because if we don’t we will begin to get charged 2.33% interest, so by the end of the 12 months you would be paying double the amount. Again, we were shocked and frustrated again that the salespeople did not explain any of this.
This whole experience really didn’t sit right with me and it began to make me think that Ashley’s whole strategy is to get over on black people and people of low income. Am I reaching? Let me know what you think.
What do you think?