Empire Today

I grew up seeing the Empire commercials on TV all the time so naturally when my husband and I needed new floors in our home (kitchen/dining/living and 2 bathrooms) they were my first call, not to mention they were having a sale. We called and scheduled an appointment for the rep Rick to come out on 6/22/20. He came out showed us our options we went with the flooring that was on sale and booked our installation for the next week 6/30/20. Unfortunately that is where this story stops being a good one. My husband had taken a half day off work to be there in the morning to meet the installers and I had made arrangements for our dogs and my self to be out of the house for the day to "work from home", we received several phone calls and text message up until the morning of our installation to make sure we had everything ready for them to come and install, stove and fridge unhooked, toilets unhooked and water and gas cut off, which we did. Only to receive a phone call after they were supposed to show up telling us they would not be able to come because they didn't have our flooring in stock. This was a huge shock to us, why weren't we called earlier or the day before so we could have resolved the issue, instead they called after the scheduled time? what are we supposed to do now? The lady told us we could have some one come out and we would have to pick a new flooring and reschedule, we said ok can someone come out today so we could move forward later with the install. We were told some one would contact us by 10am at 11 no-one had called so we called out rep Rick and asked him if he knew what was going on and he said he couldn't come out today because he was booked up but he had a collage in the area and he would call us soon and figure out a time come out after 1pm, 2pm comes around and we still have not received a call from anyone, so we called rick again who said he would find out what was going on, at 4pm we called him back again and he told us he was on his way up to our house and I would be an hour or so. We received no help from anyone we had to do all of the contacting ourselves. By the end of the day we were very upset and frustrated. During this horrible game of phone tag/please someone help us, your customers, we received an email asking us to confirm an installation day for 7/2/20. Which we did not set up and no one had contacted us to ask about a new installation date they just picked one for us and put it in the system. We called the store number to ask about it and they said they rescheduled for us, with out talking to us, and then proceeded to tell us that they didn't know when our flooring would be in but they were hoping it would be in before that but couldn't confirm it so if it wasn't in they would have to cancel the 7/2 appointment and reschedule again. Then we asked about picking new flooring and told them the rep was coming so we could pick new ones and they said ok either way you want to do it just let us know. Then about an hour after we talked to Rick, and found out he was on his way, we got a phone call from someone from empire saying that they had the flooring all along and someone misplaced or miscounted that morning and so they could now install the floors on Thursday if we wanted to keep the appointment they made for us. We said yes for fear of the flooring going missing again if we waited too long to reschedule. So once again my husband had to take a half day off work we had to make arrangements for our dogs and my self for work. The whole situation was NOT handled with any sort of professionalism, or care for us the customer, the company as a whole seemed like a disorganized mess, even the rep agreed that they needed work and that the company fell really short on providing a good customer experience for us. However, it didn't stop there though, the day of our install finally came we called to make sure they were still coming and had the flooring in stock, which apparently the woman my husband spoke to thought was hilarious and laughed at us for calling. For prep purposes, I wish some one would have let us know that our entire house would be covered in dust, I would have put all of our stuff up and in cabinets. Instead I was not informed so everything in our kitchen was covered in a laver of dust and I had to spend the next day cleaning all of our dishes, pots, counters, and floors. The crew that installed our flooring, also decided they would plug our fridge back in and use it as theirs, when we returned they had left half of a watermelon, that was leaking, half drunk bottles of water a half of a case of waters in our freezer, and mason jars with fruit and yogurt, some half eaten in our fridge! we were told our appliances needed to be off, unplugged empty and pulled away from the walls for installation purposes. I threw some of our stuff away because we had to turnoff/empty our fridge, and we had no room in our cooler. Also we had a problem with our dishwasher, while trying to unplug it we found out it was bolted to the countertops and the old flooring just had a cut out around it, so we asked that they do the same thing since we could not remove it. Instead they pushed our dishwasher further back under the counter, and placed flooring in front of it. So when we tried to use it a few days after we were unable to close it to start it. My husband had to spend hours trying to lift it out and over the boards to make it usable, if they would have just cut it like the previous flooring was done, like we asked this would not have been a problem, but no they instead pushed it back so they didn't have to cut a piece of flooring... Our toilet no longer sits properly in our bathroom it wobbles back and forth, the quarter round has started coming up in a few places (see pic) also my husband had to ask them to fix 3 or 4 pieces of the quarter round because they where clearly upside down, and he got an attitude from the installers when he asked them to fix it. All in all this was a horrible experience with Empire and we will not and have not recommended them to anyone we know.