Going Batty Quilt Shop

Hello, Last summer myself and two of my girlfriends took a class from Going batty. It was a class on long arm quilting. It was a class we had to take in order to rent their long arm quilting machine. The class cost was $75.00 each so we paid a total of $225.00. My girlfriend made and appointment to actually do some quilting on their machine. Two days before her rented time they called and told her they had sold their Long arm machine and they would let us know when they got a new one. It has now been over 6 months. We called to ask for a refund as the class we took has done us no good. We can not go to another quilt shop and use their Long arm unless we take their class, which makes sense. However we feel that we paid Going Batty in good faith with the intention of renting their machine. They have refused to give us back our money or even store credit. The owner [redacted] has refused right out to offer any compensation which we believe is unfair. We have spoke to other Quilt shops in the area and everyone of them said this was just wrong and we should be refunded.Desired SettlementWe would be fine with a full refund or store credit.Business Response I apologize for the delayed response, your initial letter to us was misplaced and I only recently received this by email. We offer many classes in our store. One of the series of classes we offer is for long arm machine quilting. There are 4 classes in this series: Beginning long arm machine quilting, intermediate long arm machine quilting, advanced long arm machine quilting, and freehand feathers long arm machine quilting. These classes instruct students on how to machine quilt using various techniques for them to apply when they quilt at home using their own long arm or sewing machine. We do offer our machine in the shop for rental and just require that the customer have taken at least the beginning long arm class so they are familiar with the basics of long arm quilting. However, that is not the primary purpose of the class, in fact very few of our beginning long arm students ever rent the machine. The purpose of the beginning long arm machine quilting class is to teach students how to properly prepare a quilt for quilting and the basics of free motion quilting. These things can be used on any long arm or home sewing machine. There is no guarantee given that we will always have a long arm machine available for rental, we sell our floor model machines frequently. [redacted] and her friends took our beginning long arm machine quilting class on August 9, 2013. During the class one of [redacted]'s friends, [redacted] signed up and paid her required deposit for rental time. About a week later our long arm machine was sold to a customer, we called [redacted] and refunded her rental deposit promptly. When we contacted our distributor about getting another long arm machine to replace this one we were told that they had changed their distribution model and we would no longer be able to purchase machines from them. We have plans to purchase another machine from a different distributor, but they are having manufacturing delays so we are currently waiting for this machine to be available. [redacted] and her friends will be able to rent time on the new machine when it arrives. We have told [redacted] this when she contacted us regarding this issue. Since this is an educational product we do not believe a refund is in order since they took the class and received instruction on basic long arm machine quilting, which is what the purpose is for the class. They will be able to use our long arm machine once we get one in the store again.Consumer Response (The consumer indicated he/she DID NOT accept the response from the business.)The only reason we took this class was to use their longarm, and they new this. We were all new to quilting and new nothing about quilting at home. They never once talked about free motion quilting in this class. The entire class was focused on their machine and how to use it. I also took a lot of videos to help me retain this information. I can send all the videos and you can see for yourself this class was specific to learning Their longarm. We did not take this class without thought, we were told about it and thought about taking before we actually did. We were not taught anything that would help us in any other part of quilting. Final Business Response Please find attached the lesson plan you requested. You will see from the lesson plan that the curriculum for the class is quite extensive, going over many different aspects of quilting, with very little dedicated to "how to use our machine". I would like to take a few moments to review the accusations made by [redacted] in her last response:1. [redacted] states that we violated the contract. We did not violate the contract. The contract she is speaking of is for a separate block of the month program that she signed up to participate in. The contract states for our local customers that they will come in and pick up their block kit each month. If they do not, then we will charge their credit card on file for the kit and a shipping fee and mail the kit to them. [redacted] paid the registration fee, filled out the contract, and purchased the first month's kit in the store on 7.13.13. She came to the store the following month, and purchased the second kit on 8.9.13. On that day she inquired about the kits being split into smaller kits, extending the amount of months that are involved in order to reduce the monthly cost. [redacted] told her that we were in the process of splitting the kits, a process that took an extraordinary amount of time to prepare because we had to go into each kit and manually cut the appliqué pieces apart with scissors in order to spread it out. She could have received the regular kits at any time, and did ask for and received the regular month 1 and month 2 kit when she asked for them. Three days after the kits were split, [redacted] was notified that the split kits were ready. She returned to the Store to purchase Kit 3. She then told [redacted] she wanted to purchase Kit 3 and Kit 4 so that she would have a complete block to sew. Kit 3 and Kit 4 together were originally before being split a regular Kit 3. She could have just purchased the un-split kit in September and not waited for them to be split or wasted the Staff's time in splitting the kits. We took the time to split the kits in order to provide good service to our Customers in response to their request to make the project more affordable.2. [redacted] states that her giving false credit card information is a joke. Our accusation that she did not give us the correct credit card information is not a joke. It's true. [redacted] (not [redacted] as we haven't had a [redacted] work for us for several years) gave [redacted] the contract to complete. [redacted] did not complete the credit card section completely, leaving out the last 4 digits. We have the sheet available to verify this, it's her handwriting. We did call and left messages multiple times over several months to get the correct CC number. [redacted] spoke with her directly on two of those occasions. The first time [redacted] said she was driving and did not have her CC on her so she would call [redacted] back. She did not return the call. The second time she told [redacted] they were moving to [redacted] and with the "thing" going on with the Long Arm class she was unsure if she wanted to continue doing business with us. She then stated she still wanted her kits but it was not her "top priority" right now.3. [redacted] states in a prior response that they are all new to quilting and knew nothing about quilting at home. This is not true. She and her friends had taken our Quilting 101 class earlier that summer in which they were taught machine quilting as part of the 6 week class. The skills taught in the long arm class are transferrable to any long arm machine/home sewing machine, not just the one we had at the time in the class. The free-motion designs are actually the same designs taught in our Quilting 101 class.4. [redacted] states that she has 12 minutes of video recordings to prove that our class material was entirely information about features and functions of one specific machine, however the class is a 3 hour class. Please reference our attached lesson plan to see the details of the curriculum which include in-depth information on free-motion quilting, which [redacted] stated earlier was not talked about at all. We ask that this dispute be settled in our favor, and not be left open as a public forum for slanderous comments or name calling. We have already offered [redacted] the use of the new long arm machine when we get it in, and will teach her the little bit that she will need to know in how that new machine operates. The rest of the skills in machine quilting she's already learned in class. Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely, [redacted]Owner, Going Batty Quilt Shop [redacted]Final Consumer Response (The consumer indicated he/she DID NOT accept the response from the business.)[redacted] you are to much. First you store violated the contract. You broke the contract first by waiting three months to give us the product. The contract was for monthy kits which we did not get for three months. I called a number of times to get my kit and they were never ready. Your-accusation of giving you a fase credit card is a joke and your way of trying to get the light off you. It was YOUR employee [redacted] who wrote down the credit card number incorrectly and not even in full. I have a voice mail from [redacted] saying just that. Her words are [redacted] I,m so sorry I did not write your number down correctly and missed a few numbers please call me. Do you want to hear the voice mail? I bet not. As for motivation , my motivation was to deal with a fare business and honest business . If I new then what I no now about your shop I would never of walked in. Your reputation in the community is well known . I have spoken to passed employees and other folks who had the unlucky pleasure of dealng with you. [redacted] I knew this would get me nowhere . I put in this complaint because the Revdex.com is there to help the consumer . The other girls will be putting in there complete next, they to expect nothing from you but we all have a right to show how we were treated in your store.