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I was up early on Saturday morning one day and I saw the infomercial for Direct Buy on TV. At the time that I had first seen the DirectBuy infomercial, I was living in an apartment in North Hollywood California which is a lower-class area in the San Fernando Valley. I called the 800 number for DirectBuy and asked for a guest pass. A few weeks later I received a letter from DirectBuy stating that there was not a DirectBuy center in my area and needless to say, there were no passes in the envelope. Also at that time my wife and I were in escrow to purchase our home in Woodland Hills.
6 or 7 months later when I was now living in Woodland Hills, I saw the infomercial again on TV. I called again, and this time I did receive some passes to there open house even though I was now living 22 miles farther form there DirectBuy Costa Mesa office then before. The invitation stated that husband and wife must attend together ( RED FLAG ! ) I’m already hip to this tactic. This means that they are going to want both parties present to sign a contract. I attended there open house anyway that weekend and here is what I found.
Having worked in sales and marketing most of my life and also having the opportunity to work on the production of an infomercial. I knew that the testimonials in infomercials are mostly all bogus. But that does not necessarily mean that the products or services are not good. But I was skeptical none the less.
The open house starts with everyone in a room watching a presentation on a TV screen and a sales person in front narrating. The salesperson would try to avoid answering any questions in front of the group. Asking to please hold all questions until after the presentation.
Well after the presentation you quickly get pushed into the main floor where the other sales people are. So if you have questions, the whole group will not over hear the questions. During the presentation we found out that the membership would cost $5000 for the first 2 years and over the next 8 years you would pay $7000 all together. If you declined the membership at the presentation, DirectBuy would not give you the opportunity to join again for 5 years. ( RED FLAG ! ) So everyone in the group quickly signed up except for my wife and I and one other couple who walked out.
I wanted to see some examples and they agreed to show me just one example. I got on the internet and looked up a (Sony 40 inch LCD TV model number _ _ _ _ _ Then I found the price of the same TV in DirectBuy’s catalog to be $100 cheaper. That’s good I guess, but that does not justify paying thousands of dollars for a membership. The sales people told me that the biggest saving would not be in electronics, but would be in the kitchen cabinets and the flooring about a 50% savings. Every thing else would only be about 10 to 15% savings. I found that the flooring and kitchen cabinets that DirectBuy offers in the catalogs are only the top priced items and name brands and not the entire lines of manufacture products. So 40 or 50% off would still not be a good price compared to items of equal quality but lesser name brand. I was lucky to have shopped for such items recently so I was up on pricing and quality of these items. Other people were easily fooled just because they were shown a direct buy catalog that said something like “ BRAND NAME HARDWOOD FLOORING MANUFACTER SUGGESTED RETAIL PRICE $7 A SQUARE FOOT. / DIRECT BUY MEMBER $4 A SQUARE FOOT ”
I know that I can get the same top quality flooring (with out the big name) for $3 a square foot almost any ware and any time. Or the same brand name flooring for much less money in a liquidation store like the Hernandez Brothers store. Same thing with the kitchen cabinets. So I decided not to join and this was even before I knew about things like, DirectBuy keeps all of the manufacture rebates or discounts including quantity discounts, and all of the other hidden cost like shipping and ordering fees. All in all DirectBuy is a big scam. I wish and I hope that some TV interrogation teem would do a TV interrogative report on this scam and ask DirectBuy why they need to change there company name so often.
This scam needs to be made public before more people lose their hard-earned money.
| Topic DirectBuySavingsAnalysis . { Edit | Ref-By | Attach | Diffs | r1.1 } |
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Revision r1.1 - 20 Oct 2006 - 18:31 by EliMantel
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