Maybe we had gotten spoiled by how quickly and efficiently D-W had always filled orders in the previous 20 years! But it was pretty distressing to not even have any clue as to what to tell customers, who were waiting for doorsets that D-W had no apparent intention of shipping to them!
Again, we really have no exact idea why this happened, and we had hoped to hear from D-W some explanation, SUCH THAT IT WOULD NOT HAPPEN AGAIN TO CUSTOMERS. "We" are not that important, but our customers are! After many weeks, we received the following explanation. Diamond W had changed their policy regarding freight, shipping to destinations other than exactly to a fireplace shop. They admitted that they hadn't ever told anyone about this change of policy, so they agreed that we had no way of knowing!
Apparently, they had shipped some doors out to OTHER dealers' customers (at home, residential addresses) and there had been some later damage claim that the shipping company would not pay. So the New Policy that Diamond W chose to institute was to REQUIRE us to sign a Contract, wherein WE now accepted any and all liabilities regarding shipping damages! This was VERY hard to understand! When a shipment was sent from the factory in Albany, NY, directly to a destination in Utica, NY, WE, near Chicago now were required to sign a rather impressive Contract where WE accepted all costs due to damages! So, IF an employee at Diamond W happened to make a mistake in boxing a doorset, WE were now entirely liable for the cost of replacement of the entire doorset! Ditto, if the shipper, or the receiving agent did any damage (in New York), WE (in Illinois) were now totally liable! Interesting!
In later discussions (over many weeks, while NO production was even STARTED on existing orders!) it became clear that their problems had occurred because doorsets had been shipped to residential addresses. I pointed out that we had NEVER had any doorsets sent to residential addresses, and D-W agreed that WE had never been involved in any such losses on their part. ALL doorsets we order always go to "business addresses" as customers often complain about!
During all of this, we still had two remaining doors on order with Diamond W, which customers ordered in late September 2005. We sent in the orders, for the Stock doorsets (which would normally have been shipped in two or three weeks) immediately, so Diamond W had those orders at the start of October 2005. It was only after other customers asked where their doors were that we asked Diamond W and learned about the New Policy. Most of the customers allowed us to refund their payments, since we already had a bad feeling about this! But by early November 2005, we were finally told by Diamond W that THEY WOULD NOT EVEN START TO BUILD the doorsets until they received the required signed New Contracts. I pointed out that they had not even ever mailed us any of them, so it was impossible for me to sign one and mail it back in! It took a few weeks more, late November 2005, but a SINGLE form arrived in the mail! I signed it and mailed it back in. Around December 5, 2005, Diamond W must have received it because they FINALLY started building ONE of the two orders of ten weeks earlier! (Early in January 2006, that customer finally received it.)
By early December 2005, we had still not received the required Contract for the second doorset! After repeated begging for it, it finally arrived in the mail late in December and I mailed it back in. So, around 14 weeks after the doorset order had been received by Diamond W, in early January 2006, they finally did the internal paperwork to START working on it! It is now mid-February 2006, around 19 weeks after the customer placed the order, and it is our impression that there is a reasonable chance it might actually finally get shipped to him!
It does not appear that D-W has further interest in our handling their doorsets, as we have not gotten any good explanation regarding all this. If the true explanation is that they really won't even START working on an order for a close customer of more than 20 years, until AFTER they receive a Contract regarding freight issues, it pretty much says that they no longer believe that our word (regarding orders) is any good! We feel that, because of mistakes others apparently did, WE are now automatically guilty until a Contract proves otherwise!
We actually have a suspicion as to why this might have happened. NO fireplace shop has EVER offered any discounts, and many charge ABOVE the suggested list prices for doorsets. Then they add on a good amount for freight, and then of course State Sales Tax is added. Our web-site has always believed in openness and honesty, and so we SHOW the exact prices we charge people for most of the 4,000+ available choices we present, with automated price calculators in the web-site (for most Brands of doors). AND, since our "actual" business since 1973 has been in manufacturing the JUCA Super-Fireplace (for which we have long used standard fireplace doors as the visible facing part), we actually never wanted or intended to sell any doors separate from our JUCA fireplaces! We eventually did as a "public service" (as our Door Selector Page URGENT link describes). We always knew that IF we would have advertised or promoted that we sold doors, at a big discount, with paying for the freight, and (usually) with no Sales Tax, we worried about hurting the business of local fireplace shops, which we definitely did NOT want to do!
Well, EVEN THOUGH "the customer is always right" they are not always very smart! When some customers discovered that our grand total prices were often $300 or $400 below what the local fireplace shop quoted them, they decided to print out our pricing form and take it down and hold it in the face of the people at the fireplace shop! (Good move, Sherlock!) Those stores were NOT going to reduce their price $400 to that or any other customer! What did they do instead? Make nasty complaints about us, to the door manufacturers, because we have tried to enable people to save some money! And what could the manufacturers do? Well, really, not much, because "this is America!" So they couldn't exactly criticize us for having "good prices" or for our being willing to pay for the freight costs!
Well, maybe we appeared to be a thorn in their side, regarding their interactions with their dealers. We don't actually know this for sure, but we think it is a very likely situation. As a result, manufacturers like D-W could not actually criticize us or punish us, because there could be legal consequences of discrimination or something. However, if they happen to just take FOREVER to get around to shipping out doorsets (as seems to be the case in recent months) then we obviously will NOT encourage our customers to seriously consider D-W doorsets. If WE don't buy any more from them, it's sort of as though we "went away!"
In any case, we now find ourselves in the position of not having any clue whether customers would actually ever receive D-W doorsets they would order through us! We do NOT want to ever again put our customers in the situation of mid/late-2005, when our customers were patiently waiting for doorsets that were never going to be shipped! Of course, we made full refunds to them, but they had wasted a month or two waiting for this strange sequence to occur.
Therefore, we would prefer that you NOT order any Diamond-W doorsets through us. If we really thought you might eventually receive them, sure, because they ARE good products!
We realize that this then forces you to have to get a Diamond-W doorset from a local fireplace shop, where it will certainly cost you hundreds of dollars more. Sorry, but that was the whole reason we had been trying to be helpful to customers, and now that is apparently no longer available regarding Diamond-W doorsets.
It is disappointing that 20 years of being a loyal customer resulted in our customers being inconvenienced in such ways. If they wanted to unload us, we wish they would have found some other way that didn't hurt customers!
It is especially sad since we had gone to a lot of trouble to AVOID hurting the business of any local fireplace shop. When we realized that if we made it too easy to buy from us, that could have happened, we INTENTIONALLY eliminated the capability of buying anything through us with a credit card. We also removed our 800- phone number from all our web-pages, and then later, our phone numbers entirely! Obviously, we could have sold a LOT of doorsets if we kept those features AND "promoted" our web-site. But we did all we could to "remain as invisible as possible" except to the people who were buying the JUCA Super-Fireplaces that we manufactured! It doesn't seem that such good intentions are appreciated!
Their door models are: