The Trouble With Carpet Shops

A lot of consumers have had bad experiences with carpet and flooring retailers. I know, I hear their tales of woe every day. Sometimes, it must be said, the customer themselves has contributed to their own downfall, but it is clear to me that the trade as a whole needs a good shake up and needs to take a good, long look at itself.

So, what upsets so many people? I think I’d probably need to break this down into categories first:

Problems with Pricing: If ever an issue was a hot potato to the trade then this one is it. A relatively minor annoyance to upstanding retailers is that some of their competitors still choose to label their prices in square yards rather than square metres as they are meant to by law. The trick is that the square yard price is lower than the square metre price (a square yard is smaller), so the unususpecting customer who has seen a carpet elsewhere for £9.99 per square metre and now finds one in the unscrupulous shop for just £8.99 per square yard, is actually going to be charged £10.75 per square metre and end up paying more to a dishonest retailer. Some shops claim they are making some kind of metric martyr stance but in reality they are doing it to fool you, the customer. Avoid ‘square yard’ shops in the UK like the plague.

A more contentious issue regarding the pricing of floorcoverings though is the ’60% off’ labels that are so common within this trade. I am not going to name and shame any retailers here, but the idea that you can cut 60% or more from the price of a carpet is nonsense. Nobody makes those sorts of margins and you can bet that if they did then there would be a carpet shop on every street corner.

This issue needs a thorough investigation by the Office of Fair Trading. Many shops claim that carpets were once priced over £30 per square metre and yet now, magically they can let you have them for just £20 per square metre! How can they possibly discount so massively? Easy – the original price is purely used by them prior to the reduction as a means of ensuring they can claim such big discounts. In reality no other shops than them ever had the carpet anywhere near £30 per square metre and usually the shops that offer such ‘generous’ discounts end up with a final price that is simply around the average going rate for the product. I could name the larger retailers that do this, but I won’t. The practice is not exclusive to the big boys though, I’ve even seen small retailers try it.

In fact one of the largest carpet manufacturers told us (about 6 or 7 years back) to deliberately inflate our prices in early December (carpet shops have fewer customers coming in the shop then as they are all booked up for Christmas), so that we could discount their products in January. They even had pre-printed posters ready for us! The January price was actually just our normal retail price. Needless to say we told them where to go — disgraceful.

Fitters: The fitter is the last person the customer sees. A good fitter is worth his weight in gold to any shop and good fitters often mean repeat business. We are lucky in that we trust all of our fitters implicitly and know that their work is spot on at all times. That hasn’t always been the case – we’ve managed, unwittingly, to employ some awful ones, but luckily rooted them out before too much damage was done. Lots of shops do not realise the importance of good fitters and to my mind there are two equally important aspects to fitting. Too many shops pay little or no attention to who they employ or subcontract fitting work to – make sure you ask about who will be fitting your flooring when you buy it and an answer like “they all fit correctly to British Standards” is not what you need to hear – that should be a given!

Obviously the standard of the work must be professional and consistent and the fitter must be reliable and honest. The most overlooked aspect though is that the fitter should have people skills. They should be personable, friendly and polite at all times. There are scores of surly, stroppy and downright rude floor fitters around I’m sorry to say and many of them should simply never be unleashed on the public!

Qualifications for fitters are relatively new and many of the very best fitters have no formal qualifications. Certainly NVQs are beginning to surface now, but to my mind and my own experience of NVQs, they are not worth much at all. There is no substitute for experience, ability and personality in my view. Sure, if a fitter has been on many courses then at the very least he is eager to learn and taking his occupation seriously, so it’s good to see, but it’s not going to mean that he is a better fitter per se. As with so many other trades now these new qualifications are being levered into the trade for one main reason – that’s to earn money for the course providers.

The biggest concern with fitting though is shops who will take no responsibility whatsoever for their fitters’ work. Now I don’t care if the fitter was paid separately or in the shop at the time of sale (a thorny issue with fitters, shops and HMRC), the shop must take action when a customer is not happy. Legally they don’t need to if a fitter was paid separately, but surely they have a moral obligation to sort out any problems. Sure, not all complaints are legitimate or reasonable, but if a shop simply says ‘not my problem, phone the fitter,’ then they are not providing any kind of customer service. Ask the question at the time of purchase , “what do I do if I have a problem with the fitting?” Regardless of whether we used an employed or a subcontracted fitter, I would always seek to resolve the problem with the fitter rather than referring the customer to him directly. A good shop wants to discover any shortcomings or problems to ensure that everything is as it should be.

Salesmen: Generally speaking, salesmen are not impartial. They are there to make money for themselves by selling add-ons, hitting their targets and earning commission. This is where smaller shops have the edge. In my shop I will only ever try to sell something I am confident of and I don’t earn commission, so I am looking to give you a good deal so that you will come back to me next time. Many small shops operate like this – they need your business and they have to convince you to recommend them and to be happy with your purchase. Larger retailers very often could not care less. The TV ad, or full page press ad will bring another boat load of customers in tomorrow.

Ask the salesman specific questions about what you are buying. Don’t be fooled by ‘heavy domestic’ labels – you will struggle to find carpets without that on them! Also make sure that whatever the salesman promises is on your invoice – removal of furniture etc. Ignore the warranties – mostly meaningless and read reviews of carpets and flooring on here as I add them. You can even email me for my opinion on any carpet or floorcovering.

Most salesmen receive little training and fail to understand the whole process. All salesmen should go out with fitters to understand what’s involved, yet very few do. Most fitters curse the ‘idiot’ salesman who has promised the customer the earth without thinking of talking it through with the fitter first.

One question I am often asked is why don’t shops tell you how much carpet you need when they come out and measure? Simple – it is because they have come out and (usually for no charge) measured and planned the job and if they hand you a plan then you may well have no intention of buying a carpet from them and may simply have been taking advantage of the system. Most shops are wise to this and therefore will refuse to give you your sizes until after purchase. A lot of cheap and nasty shops don’t provide this service so reputable shops are often taken advantage of and it is very annoying I can tell you! I can usually smell a rat from the off though -people who are looking to use and abuse this system tend to say very similar things and act in a very similar way. If a shop or fitter thinks you definitely won’t buy from them then there is also the possibility that they will deliberatley give the wrong sizes – I’ve seen this many times when we have got to the job and the poor customer’s carpets have all been too small because some irritated estimator elsewhere was sulking he didn’t get that job. Always ask the shop who you are going to buy from to come out and measure.

Presentation: Very often this is woeful. To be fair to all and sundry in the trade, things are now improving slowly but many shops look like something from Steptoe and Son. Pattern books piled up and strewn all over the floor, display stands falling to bits and unclear or non-existent pricing on the products. We’ve had our fingers burnt several times by spending a fair amount of money on stands that turn out to be disastrous for us. I remember that our Abingdon/Carpets International stands cost us several thousand pounds and we were supposed to be on better terms than non stand holders because of that, but we found out that we just weren’t – lovely.

A fair amount of blame can be passed squarely to the manufacturers who seem to think we ought to pay premium prices for their super duper display stands. They have a lot to learn. Vinyl manufacturers have it sussed – Rhinofloor, Leolan, Nairn, Tarkett, Polystyl etc all provide lovely FREE stands to show off their wares, yet carpet manufacturers almost always ask for vast sums (allegedly rebatable on sales) for theirs. They provide little or no point of sale – few posters, NO catalogues, little advertising etc – a note to all carpet manufacturers: please please please print a catalogue of your products! A nice colourful, glossy catalogue would do wonders and I can’t help wondering why this is rarely done. Even a CD-Rom with PDFs on it would be a start or else a decent website – Associated Weavers, Domo, Beaulieu , I’m looking at you.

Another problem is that the samples we receive are all different sizes and many just will not fit on the display racks we have. Is it too much to ask for an industry standard carpet sample size? I suggest 9″/18″ and 27″ and nothing else.

That’ll do for now – I’m sure there are more though.

(Originally posted on 9th June 2009)