McIntosh Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc.

Initial Business Response /* (1000, 9, 2016/01/28) */
Jeff contacted us to purchase a female bulldog puppy. He is a previous client having purchased one puppy from us before. The previous transaction was without incident. The customer asked us to arrange shipping, which we did. The cost of...

shipping was $500. We used a service that we have used in the past with great success. Unfortunately, the driver for the service did a poor job. The delivery estimate we got was one to two days, we confirmed this with the service and the driver. Jeff contacted us 6 days later to let us know the dog had not arrived, that he had been in touch withe driver and that the driver was giving him excuses regarding delivery. At that time, I started to try to contact the service. Before I could contact the service I got an email from Jeff that the dog had arrived in poor condition, pneumonia, skin issues, etc and that he had taken her to the vet within one hour of her arrival. The driver called me back, and when I asked him if the dog was OK, he said Yes, no problems at all. So, after repeated emails from Jeff, my wife spoke to him on the phone. Even though this was no fault of ours, we still felt sympathetic to the client and the care of the dog. We refunded $1000 for the vet bill and $500 for the delivery. Jeff accepted this and we sent the refund within ten minutes. A few days later jeff sent us the vet bill which was a highly inflated $772. He wanted us to pay for it, but we already had? The matter was closed to us when we sent the refund. We have tried to work with the shipping company, the driver has been fired, but to date we have not recovered any of the money we had to refund. The dog was in perfect health at our home. We have been breeding for over 15 years, it is a hobby and passion for us, we are not in the business of trying to take advantage of people. We have treated the client fairly, he accepted the refund, so in our minds we have no further remedy.
OFFER:
I can send a copy of our health guarantee if required.
Initial Consumer Rebuttal /* (3000, 11, 2016/02/11) */
(The consumer indicated he/she DID NOT accept the response from the business.)
Most of what the breeder is saying is accurate with the exception of the partial refund we agreed on and the statement that they refunded the shipping costs to us. For one we would never agreed to purchase a dog in such poor health. I have emails that clearly state that I wanted to have the medical bills covered by the breeder as well as renegotiating the original purchase price of the dog. I never sought any refund for the shipping as they had agreed to cover that cost. I have that in an email as well. During the phone conversation the breeder agreed to cover the costs of the vet care once a final bill was rendered. We went over the charges in detail and she agreed that they were not overly inflated in fact our Dr took special care to keep them down upon our own request of him. Only after getting assurance that the breeder would pay the vet costs I turned the conversation towards renegotiating the purchase price of the dog. I explained that would be happy to pay $1,500 less than the $2,500 I had originally paid for the dog making the new purchase price after refund a total of $1,000 - the owner after borage of insults to me and my character hastily agreed to send me the partial refund and did. I never agreed to that as a final amount for the vet costs and purchase price adjustment and would not have for the care of the dog was still on going at that time. Again, I never spoke to her about the shipping charges for I did not agree at any time to pay for them in the first place the breeder had offered to cover that cost.