Greg bought some vouchers from LivingSocial for a cleaning company that appears to have gone out of business. It’s not 100% clear that they’re out of business, but it is clear that they were terrible. He can’t get through to the company on the phone, and has $150 worth of vouchers left.

It’s not all that surprising that the cleaning company went out of business, because they are terrible.

I’m about 20-25 emails/calls in at this point, but today it finally became hilarious. I saw you’ve done a few LivingSocial posts but this one might take the cake…

I bought a pack of 3 LivingSocial vouchers for a cleaning service called [redacted] in January. The hilarious points:
• The 1 time the cleaners did come (in Jan), they were clearly not professional cleaners. Besides being 3 hours late and doing a sub-standard job, they talked back and forth to each other about not having “caught their big break like Beyonce” in their music careers yet. And only interrupted that to ask me where my vacuum was because they forgot theirs.
• They no-showed for appt #2, a month later (but did illegally mark the voucher as ‘used’). When I got home and looked into it, it turns out they had been no-showing on customers for weeks. Maybe they finally got their big music break, but it was clear they weren’t cleaning houses anymore.
• When I called the two numbers listed on the voucher, phone number #1 had a full voicemail box. Phone number #2, on their voucher, turned out to be the line of a poor Kaiser Permanente employee who had altered her voicemail greeting asking the public to stop leaving angry voicemails about [the cleaning company] (it’s still up, I just called again). Phone number #3, listed on their FB page, is a disconnected line.

Over the course of two months and much prodding, LivingSocial has refused to refund the unused vouchers. They have sent me 3 different emails over the last two months claiming to have “been in touch with” the company (despite the fact that all 3 phone lines are defunct), and that their policy of refunding when a company goes out of business doesn’t apply here despite the masses of public online comments from other people that can’t even find a phone number that will allow to leave a voicemail. (In my imagination, LivingSocial’s magic line to this defunct company looks something like the bat phone)

Today, 2 months later, LivingSocial sent me a mass email offering… more vouchers for a different cleaning service.

When I contacted them today, they said they can’t refund it, but they will offer me an olive branch — they’ll allow me to “gift” the vouchers for the defunct cleaning company to a friend instead. (They must think I hate my friends?)

It’s funny, but it’s also $150 worth of vouchers. Please help!

LivingSocial makes their refund policy pretty clear, which is that you need to ask for a refund within a week, or no refund for you. At all. Maybe Greg could gift the vouchers to one of this enemies?

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