Royal Prestige My experiences with Royal Prestige. Des Moines Iowa

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Rip-off Report Investigation: shows that Hy Cite / Royal Prestige is fulfilling its commitment to provide excellent customer service. Rip-off Report gives Hy Cite / Royal Prestige a POSITIVE rating in customer support & quality assurance. They pledge to resolve complaints & address any issues - committed to 100% satisfaction - consumers to feel safe & secure.

My fiancee and I were invited to what sounded to us like some sort of bridal fair at a Holiday Inn here in Des Moines. They had mentioned that we had won a free trip, and a $500 gift certificate. We thought we might as well go check it out, so we went. When we got there it was not at all what we expected. It turned out to basically be an infomercial in a conference room.

I can fully admit that I was taken in by the presentation of the products and the claims made against other products. I should note that I actually liked the representative, and our conversation that was unrelated to his products was, even on reflection, quite pleasant. I still feel that at the end of the night were were very much pressured into putting our money into his products.

In retrospect I feel that I should have read the contract much more carefully and asked many more questions than I did. I mistakenly made the assumption that the interest rate would not be something exhorbant, and him saying that our payments would be 80 some odd dollars a month drew me into this. What I didn't realize is that this did not include the whopping 20% interest that was explained on the reverse side of the page. Little to none of what was on this side of the page was explained to us by the representative.

After leaving the presentation with a receipt for lowest package of cookware (with free knives, to boot) I was feeling okay about my purchase, though I really couldn't believe I had just bought something in a hotel conference room. I was, honestly, still excited about my 500$ gift certificate and free trip package.

The following morning (Sunday) I logged on to the shopping spree website, hoping to at least find some minor electronics or tools I might find useful around the house. What I found at the website were off-name products, and videogames so out of date that they were completely worthless. They had a copy of Madden 2002 in their game library. Madden 2007 just came out.

That's not even the half of it with the shopping spree though. We were told at the presentation that we would have to pay the shipping fees on the products, and nothing else. When I got the website I found that there was indeed fee involved with every single item used on the shopping spree. Feeling curious I started googling some of the items, and found that the "shipping and handling fee" was almost identical to the base price of said product at other online retailers. The "500 dollar shopping spree" is, at best, a place to save 1 or 2 dollars per item on a bunch of things you probably don't need around your house.

After closing the window I had the spree open in (effectively losing my spree, oh no!) I got a little paranoid and began checking this site, reselleratings, and a lengthy article that I found on (((ROR REMOVED LINK FOR SECURITY PURPOSES))) I decided that cancelling our oerder would be a brilliant thing to do. I immediately called royal prestige, and, struggling not to lose my temper told them that they need to return my call as soon as possible, and that if they didn't by 9 the next morning I would be calling them again. I also mentioned the nature of what my call would be - a cancellation - and that I have read some things on the sites I mentioned before that have made me very weary of their company.

Only then did I really sit down and read the fine print of the contract we had signed. I noticed, to my horror, that they have a no-return policy and I only have three business days to, in writing, cancel my order. My fiancee and I immediately prepared the yellow cancellation form and I planned to take it to the office first thing in the morning.

Reading all about their heavy handed tactics on both this website and other websites scared me into thinking that my fiancee might not get her deposit check refunded, or that they might even start charging us sooner than expected, we called our bank and did a stop payment on the check. This was a precautionary measure, and in the end may not have been necessary, but I was not taking any chances with the repuation the company has seems to have.

After I got home I realized that I had not included my copy of the application along with the yellow cancellation form, and I wondered if that would be a problem. I called back the local royal prestige office, and was put "on hold," (the phone was set on a table) while the woman went to find a higher up to talk to me.

I spoke with a man whom wasn't very warm with me from the very beginning, and frankly I don't blame him. I sounded pretty bitter on the initial message I left him, but I also think I had a pretty good reason to be.

He told me he would be able to cancel my order simply with the yellow cancellation form that I had brought in, to start off. From there he addressed my message, asking me if I believe everything that I read on the internet. I responded by asking him if he believes everything that he hears in a conference room at a Holiday Inn from a man he's never met before.

He then went off on a rant about how everyone gets sued, even big companies like Wal-Mart. What he fails to realize is that in the vast spectrum of things, Wal-Mart has a good track record. When you google a company and ripoffreport comes up in the top 5 or 6 search results, that should generally be a red flag. He also tried to refute me by saying that none of the websites I had mentioned were goverment agencies.

He said they were all people that wanted one thing: money. I don't know about you, but I don't think that's what the consumers I've read about were looking for. They just wanted their money back on what was, by their estimation, a defective or un-wanted product.

He concluded the conversation by basically saying that I had wasted my time and money in cancelling my check, and that he would have gladly refunded my money anyway. Like I said, I was completely unfamiliar with the company and the amount of complaints and legal nightmares I had read about on the above mentioned websites definitely made me want to take the precautionary measures to do what I did.

Perhaps the Des Moines division of Royal Prestige is an honest division of the company (it doesn't mean their products are any different). They have apparently honored the contract they presented to me and I am grateful to them for doing that. It's easy to understand why I did what I did, however, as they have apparently been sued in 3 states and had some very unsatisfied customers if these consumer websites are any indication.

In the end this has worked out well for me (assuming we don't see any eyesores on our credit cards in a few months...which I'm condfident we won't), but this is simply a warning: Always be aware of what you're signing. Whether Royal Prestige products work, don't work, are worthless, are the greatest pans on earth, cause cancer, or whatever anyone can claim about them - please read the contract (and any contract, for that matter) before you sign it.

Especially a company with a no-return policy that only lets you cancel within the first 3 days after ordering, making it completely impossible for you to try the products out in your own home for any period of time. That alone should make anyone weary of buying their products.

Anonymous
Des Moines, Iowa
U.S.A.

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