Author: /u/flowersfory0u

This took place at: Mower Parts and Supply Co
Address: 11716 Hempstead Rd, Houston, TX 77092

In September, my dad took his lawnmower for repairs to this location and the owner charged him $40 for evaluation, normal stuff. We left it there and after 2 months, he still hadn’t repaired it. So I called in November to ask for details since my English is a bit better, because this is the second time my dad drives over there (he would drop by the store every 4 weeks when his check arrived since he lives paycheck to paycheck) to ask about it and they essentially give him no real answers other than that it’s not ready yet. When I called to inquire what the hold up was, the owner didn’t have any real reason and apologized, claiming life stuff came up. I know life happens and was understanding; it was just reassuring to reach out personally to check in on the status of the mower. (The rest of the story is below. )

I’m pretty drained after trying to resolve this for 20 minutes with him today so please accept the copy/paste below from a review I left. It is clear he wasn’t going to take any responsibility and kept changing his story, and I needed to figure out if this was worth pursuing further. I decided it wasn’t and will take it as a loss since the mower isn’t worth much in the grand scheme of things. So here’s the review I left (at the bottom) to tell the rest of the story here. My question is, aside small claims court, is there anything less drastic I could do in this situation? I would at the very least like him to repay us enough money to purchase another used lawn mower. In frustration I blurted out he needed to pay us $300 when he angrily asked how much I wanted in reimbursement, but I just made up a number since I wasn’t expecting to be in this situation. He laughed and offered me $50 and I declined.

“The shop owner took in our mower for repairs at the beginning of September. He did not work on it for several weeks – I believe in total, he didn’t touch our mower for about 2 months.

In October (edit: it was actually November), my father checked in again for updates and there was none. I called to ask what was going on and the owner apologized, saying life stuff came up. No problem, we’re all humans and things happen.

We speak again in December and he gives me a new estimate. He had given my father and I very different estimates at different times and when I asked about this, he blamed the discrepancies on my dad’s hearing. The estimate went from $140 to $300 and I said we didn’t have the money currently (in December) because we had a big bill coming up, but we will come by to pay for the repairs and pick up the mower in a few weeks. Today (March 8), we go to pick up the mower only for the owner to tell us he has given it away to scraps because we took too long. I ask him to refund us the $40 and I also asked for our mower again despite already being told he has given it away to scraps. He made no attempt to call us, none. He gets angrier and asks me, “what do you want?” “How much do you want?” He offered me $50 to make up for it and I don’t accept it – that is not enough to buy a new/used mower. I don’t actually know what to do here, but I record the interaction. I caught this man lying on my phone (he claimed we hadn’t spoken in 6 months). Meanwhile, his lacky/coworker is saying, “she’s recording illegally!” I’m recording because this man CANNOT keep his story straight. He also told my father that I claimed it was not worth repairing in our last phone call in December, which is a complete lie. He was arguing with another customer when I had arrived and that went on for a moment. This owner is a perpetual liar, and he wasn’t at all apologetic about throwing away our mower because we “took too long to pick it up”. Yet I was understanding when he needed extra time to repair it. But evidently, he ultimately did not repair it and gave it to scraps, OR, is lying and sold it to someone else. “

I’m just extremely upset. I know it was just an old mower but it was still my dad’s mower, and I can’t help but assume the store owner probably just sold it off as opposed to “throw it away”. We don’t have much money, so this one hurt.

Anyway, “say mower one more time, btch!” At the very least I wanted to vent into the ether about this frustrating experience.

Date correction: I do want to correct the date regarding when we dropped off the mower (and I updated this date on my actual review). I was going off memory but I noticed I had a pending review for this shop on Yelp that has the exact day we dropped it off, which is mid September and not the beginning.