WINNIPEG — What one Winnipeg family calls a high pressure door-to-door sale of a furnace almost cost Kim Mills four times what experts say it should have.
Kim Mills said she was at home watching TV on a Sunday evening in August when she heard a knock at her door. She found someone at her door telling her they needed to take a look at her furnace to see if it meets Manitoba Hydro standards.
Mills said she let the men in and they went down and checked her furnace. Then, they informed her that she needed a new one.
To this day, Mills said she doesn’t know if she actually needed a new one or not, but she felt pressured in to buying one and an air conditioning unit as well.
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Mills has a learning disability and said she told the salesmen that she had one, and wanted to contact her sister or mom. She said they told her since she owned the house she had the authority to do whatever they wanted to.
“I’m a widow and I want to try and do things on my own, but it’s not always working,” said Mills.
So she went ahead and made the decision to purchase the equipment on her own. But once her family found out, they looked further in to the situation and felt like Mills was taken advantage of.
“I feel kind of degraded about it. I was pretty upset about it after,” added Mills.
Mill said the equipment from the company Simply Green Home Services would have cost her more than $16,000. Which the experts say is much more than any competitor pricing. Grant Hein is the Director for Heating Refrigeration Air Conditioning Institute of Canada and said he would put a street value on the equipment at only five or six thousand dollars.
The company agreed to uninstall the equipment and refunded the purchase price to Mills. The Director of Operations, Dela Kumarshellah told Global News that due to this case and several others, the salesman involved in this sale has been fired.
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“There’s always going to be those bad apples that will ruin the reputation and that’s why we take that very seriously,” said Kumarshellah.
She added the education and training is constantly provided for the representatives that go to people’s doors and when all of that fails termination is the next step.
Winnipeg Police Services said the company isn’t doing anything illegal, but they have received at least ten complaints against the company since 2015.
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