ATLANTA — It was late at night, raining heavily and 83-year-old Ruth Barnes was so charmed by the saleswoman for LeafGuard of Northern Georgia she offered to let her stay the night to avoid driving home in the bad weather.
“Honestly, she was such a sweet, lovely girl. I would have written up a nice report for her because I thought she did such a good job. Well, she did. She got us good. She got us really good,” Barnes said.
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Barnes now believes she paid significantly more for gutters for her Roswell townhome than she should have after that long, late-night sales pitch.
“I feel cheated. But more than more than anything, it made me question, you know, my sanity,” she told Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Justin Gray.
Barnes says the LeafGuard sales pitch to her and her neighbor Barbara Jones, also a widowed senior citizen, lasted hours, deep into the evening.
“I was so tired. I was so tired. I go to bed at 8:30...9:00. Now, it’s almost 10:30 after the sales pitch and all of that’s gone on. And she starts with the paperwork,” Barnes said.
That paperwork includes a right to cancelation within 3 days but both women woke up to LeafGuard installing the new gutters the following morning.
“The next morning, 8:00 in the morning, somebody is banging on the roof and I’m thinking, what in the world is that?” Barnes said.
Barnes was charged more than $6,000 for the new gutters, and Jones more than $8,000.
Tim Barnes, Ruth’s son, says he immediately called LeafGuard when he found out about the cost 3 days later.
“When I called the manager, his response, well, they’re the Lamborghini of gutters was a quote that he gave me. Just absolutely ridiculous,” Tim Barnes said.
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Barnes says he checked gutter cost estimates online, then got a written quote from another metro Atlanta gutter company for gutters and gutter guards. It was $909.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” he said.
Ruth Barnes says she wanted to speak out, to warn other seniors to be careful.
“I feel bad about the company that would do this to older people or to anybody, not just me, but any take advantage of people in any way like this,” Barnes said.
Gray spoke on the phone for half an hour with LeafGuard’s national Vice-President, who at the end of the call declared the entire conversation “off the record.” Those are not terms Channel 2 Action News agreed to.
An off-the-record conversation has to be agreed to by both parties at the start.
So, we can report that LeafGuard claims they “did nothing wrong.”
Leafguard alleges it was a fair price for the type of “premium” complete gutter system they provide. LeafGuard says “there was nothing out of line” with the cost and that they even provided a senior discount.
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