This might seem to be about the most anti-mustachian thing to do, but we bought a $1300 Kirby vacuum cleaner.  We happened to have the money at the time the salesman came, and we were pretty impressed with the presentation they gave. The previous owners/renters of our house had cats.  We don't know if it was one, two, or a whole dozen, but there are certain places where it is obvious.  One night there was a knock at our door and my wife told me there was a woman there.  I went to the door to discover that her company was offering a free one room carpet cleaning.  Well, that's perfect, we have at least one room in mind which could really use it. She told us that they could be right over within the next hour, so we sat down for our dinner of homemade chili.  As if they could see into our house and tell we just finished we heard another ring on our doorbell and outside stood two gentlemen, one claiming to be from Kenya, and the other a slick salesman. We quickly found out that this wasn't a free carpet cleaning as we had been led to believe.  

They convinced us to let them do their presentation anyway, and so they began.  The salesman quickly left to attend to other business and now we had a fumbling guy from Kenya in our house. First he had us bring out our vacuum cleaner and do a once over with it, make sure that we were satisified with everything, that we thought it was clean.  Now he brought out his Kirby vacuum and attached a special attachment which has a glass top to look through and a spot to put white or black filters in so you can see the dirt it sucks up.  It was sort of impressive that it still sucked up a little bit of dirt, but not overly so.  He also layed out some baking soda and showed us that the vacuum has no trouble picking that up too. While he was doing his demonstration I was searching online for Kirby and reviews about them.  A lot of negative reviews concerning their sales tactics, I mean a lot.  Weeding through these I found that the people who had a good experience, or didn't let the sales experience ruin their view of the vacuum, actually enjoy the vacuum.  

I noticed the prices that people were buying them for, the lowest getting to be around $1200.  I told that to my wife and she nearly fainted. He then continued through various attachments and how they can be used to clean our ceiling fan, our ceiling, our walls, etc.  We quickly noticed that he didn't seem to be the most comfortable with the vacuum, clumsly assembling and dissassembling the head and attachments.  which is the best vax vacuum cleanerMy wife tried pushing it and had some trouble until he remembered to put it in drive instead of neutral.  vacuum cleaner center michigan city inAfter he did that it was a breeze to push forward and backwards.shark vacuum cleaner weight Next we went to our bedroom and he showed us how it can pick up all the dead skin cells from the mattress.  

That was pretty good.  By this time he was calling his salesman and asking him to come back. We went back to our living room where the first part of the presentation began.  He continued to show us that it can pick up dirt.  When the salesman got there he saw what he was doing.  He asked the man from Kenya if he could have some more of those white filters.  He dissassembled the head and reassembled it with the belt now attached that drives the brush, and put a new filter in the demonstration attachment.  After doing this he proceeded to vacuum our floor really quickly.  Within a couple pushes on the carpet we noticed a huge difference.  Now this was impressive.  Before the filter just had a small amount of particles which were attached to the fibers, this filter now had so much dirt on it that they were loose stacked on top of each other.  That really got us thinking. Recently my wife had been looking at the Dyson brand of vacuum cleaners.  Her friend had just gotten a pink one and she really wanted to get a better vacuum cleaner than the bargain vacuum we got on sale at Target.  

Having now done my research it was time for us to start the back and forth on the price. He started by asking us how much we thought it might be.  My wife said about $1200, and he was left aghast at first.  He pulled out his sheet which shows the price starting at $2999 for just the vacuum, then having two more levels with additional attachments with the highest being $3499.  There was no way we could do $3499, and knowing others had bought it for $1200 we weren't going to settle at that. His next move after giving us the shock of the full price package was to then give us the "special deal" which they have right now.  He pulled out one of those white filters and wrote on it $1750 and said that he could give us that price if we gave him our old vacuum.  There was a rush of relief, we didn't have to battle down from $3499, he took half of that away for us. My wife is a very cute asian with all the body language of an anime character.  Both of us knowing Mandarin we spoke often with each other about what to do right in front of the salesman.  

We have this sort of good cop bad cop routine that we do where I play the scrougey husband, and she plays the cute girl wife that really wants to buy it.  We've found that speaking in Chinese makes the salesman think that we might not buy and will be willing to lower the price a bit more.  He then wrote down a new number, $1350.  My wife's face changes to a smile with slitted eyes and says, "Really?!"  I grumble a little bit more, and then she uses her broken English to ask for a better price.  He asks if we have any other vacuums that we could give him and my wife reluctantly grabs her Shark handheld which she got for $20 on sale at Target.  He says he'll take $50 off for $1300. From $3499 down to $1300 for all attachments, including a shampooer, sounded pretty good.  The $1200 price we saw online was from about 6 months or so ago, so we figure we've done pretty good.  We agree to it and he goes and gets the contract. It would be great if it had ended here, but unfortunately a few of the attachments were not available at the time and would have to be mailed.  

He noted that on the contract receipt and said if he was in the area tomorrow he would drop them by.  A couple weeks later we still have no word.  I try calling them and got someone on the line who said they would mail them out.  After another week we still had not received anything so I called again, this time getting voicemail.  I tried many more times and left a couple voicemails. It wasn't until I left a voicemail saying that if we didn't receive these items we would then have to seek out other options to resolve this that I got a call back from them.  The man was fairly polite and apologetic, he promised to send them out that afternoon by 4pm and to include some extra bags for our trouble.  He also promised to call me after he got the tracking number so I could know when the shipment would be in. Needless to say I never got the call, and after two days we were calling them again.  We live about 13 miles from their distribution center, so two days is more than enough time for the package to get to our house.  

I left one last message, then started a dispute with my credit card company.  I also penned a letter to them and mailed it out declaring that we no longer desired the extra attachments but would rather now have a credit to our account.  We sent the letter out Saturday morning. Tuesday we received a package from FedEx with the attachments, sans extra bags.  The tracking number indicates that the order wasn't prepared to be shipped until Sunday and was picked up Monday afternoon around 4pm.  It is my assumption that our letter must have gotten to them Saturday so they finally got off their asses and sent the package. The following Saturday we made a trip out to their distribution center and talked to one of their trainers from California who said he would pass on a message since administrative staff are gone on the weekend.  Later that afternoon we got a call back from them and at first it was the trainer talking again but then it switched to a manager as I continued to complain about the delay in getting the accessories and the number of times I had to call to get them.

She apologized for the delays and the inconvienence that we had experienced.  After that we discused getting a refund and returning the items, although we really did want to keep the vacuum.  She said she would talk to her boss who is currently in California receiving more training.  She happend to call him right after we hung up and he agreed to refund the cost of the accessories and let us keep them.  That was an unexpected gesture that really changed our view of the company.  Now I'm no longer so against them because of our experience, it shows they were willing to make it up to us, which is so different than many of the stories we read online. Now my wife is happy, I'm happy, and we have a pretty cool vacuum cleaner.  We've already shampooed our carpet with it and vacuumed our entire house multiple times including our bed.  The stairs look quite a bit different now instead of showing obvious wear in the center of the stairway, the carpet fibers now stand up again. My wife has agreed to keep the carpet now because she figures that the vacuum is something that she can take with her to other houses we may have, but it is hard to bring hardwood floors.