Unifirst Subpar Service. Subpar Products. Louisville Kentucky

To whom it may concern,

My company has been a customer of Unifirst since June 2016. In the 8 months we’ve used Unifirst we have continued to have issue upon issue with out uniforms. Our issues have ranged from being charged for items we have yet to receive to repeatedly being given incorrect or unacceptable uniforms. The service providers we have dealt with have continued to pass the buck and our issues have yet to be resolved. I spoke with a service manager today and their newest solution is to drop our contract and charge us a buy-out fee. This solution is unacceptable to us and would appreciate any attempt to resolved our service issues in another fashion.

The first and most prominent issue we’ve had is with embroidery. We ordered multiple polo style shirts for our management staff that were to include their names and our company logo on the front and our website on the back. Being a veteran owned and operated company we specified when embroidering the shirts that we wanted the battle Flag on the right sleeve. When we received the polos (after waiting a multitude of weeks) they were not correct. The website was at a nearly 45° angle. When contacting Unifirst we provided pictures of the crooked embroidery and they promised to resolved the issues with both the Flag and the website. Once we finally received the replacement shirts they were all resized one size up. We again returned the order and they once again promised to resolve the issue. Needless to say the third order we received was again incorrect. The third and final order of polo shirts we received from Unifirst had the corrected sizing, corrected website, but still had the American Flag backwards. They gave us their word once again that they would fix this issue. We have never again received another order of polos. When calling and speaking with a service manager we were told they ordered a single polo to make sure it was corrected before placing the entire order but it “must’ve been misplaced”. They reordered the single shirt yet it has never arrived and we have continued to be charged for them.

We’ve also had numerous issues with our Dickies mechanic shirts. The issue is once again with the embroidery. We received our first batch of shirts with the stitching completely through both patches on all of the uniform shirts. We felt, as any company would, that this was unacceptable. We returned the shirts. The next several batches we received never included our full order and were all missing the ASE patches we provided to Unifirst to attach to our head mechanic’s uniforms.

The issues with the mechanic’s uniforms we’re resolved (after multiple attempts) and we hadn’t had an  issue with them again until we placed an order for a new mechanic. We ordered 7 of the same matching uniform shirts and 7 matching pair of cargo pants. The cargo pants arrived 4-6 weeks after ordering (a size larger than we ordered) and the shirts took an additional 2 weeks. We were also being charged for the shirts before we received them. Today the shirts arrived and were once again incorrect. They took it upon themselves to embroider the shirts with and American Flag (the Flag belongs on our polos only), and they delivered long sleeve shirts. When ordering this mechanic’s uniforms I initially called the Unifirst office and spoke with Devon. Devon placed the order for 7 medium short sleeve shirts, 7 cargo pants, and a size medium permalined jacket. They order never arrived so our driver placed the order again after they did not arrive. We have yet to receive the jacket and have never heard another word about it.

A few weeks before ordering the additional uniforms we placed an order for 3 of the Manager’s Specials Unifirst was running which included a Cartheart style jacket, coveralls, and a beanie. When we received the jackets there was a zipper tab broken in half and the embroidery was missing letters from our name and from our slogan. I provided pictures to our driver which he passed along to the service manager. They replaced the order and the issues with those jackets were solved. I then placed another order for a Manager’s Special in a size medium for our newest employee. We received the jacket and coveralls with no issue but have never received the beanie.

In the 8 months we have been customers with Unifirst we’ve had 4 drivers and 2 service managers. None of them have been able to resolve these issues.

I now have our service manager writing up a buy our price, this is unacceptable. I will not purchase uniforms through Unifirst and have to turn around and move to another uniform company and reorder uniforms. We are not in the business of wasting money and that is exactly what that option would be doing. Any uniforms we obtain through another company with not be, in fact, uniform with the apparel your company is attempting to force up to purchase.

I am not placing blame on any particular person within your company, in fact, I believe the majority of the issues we’ve had is a direct result of a subpar embroidery company. There have been some issues with misordering, negligence, and late shipping but those things alone could’ve, perhaps, been looked past and blamed on human error.