Firewood Promises

Didn’t Stack Up

To the Editor:

Watch out for scammers when buying firewood. I called an ad selling firewood for $225 per cord with free stacking. I told the man I needed four cords of hardwoods 16–18 inches long. He asked me specifically what woods I wanted. We agreed mostly oak. He told me he could only deliver three cords as the oak made four cords too heavy for his truck. OK three cords.

The day of delivery he calls and says he needs to make the delivery in two loads. OK. When he arrived he said the grass was too wet to drive over and that he doesn’t “walk wood.” OK, no problem, we rather he didn’t drive over our lawn anyway, and we’re used to stacking wood. He told us the load he just dumped was two cords and he would be back with the other two cords. It didn’t register at the time, we had agreed on three cords. In the meantime, we stacked the wood on our pallets and measured. To our dismay, only 1¼ cords. Big difference! When he returned with the next load we showed him the stacked wood and that it only measured 1¼ cords. He said we had stacked it wrong and that it was actually 1¾ cords (even though he told us previously that he had left two cords). He said he could restack the wood to look like two cords. (Well OK if you like paying for air space.) He was charging us $900 (price for four cords, we had agreed on three) but he would take off $50 and if that wasn’t OK, threatened to throw the wood back on the truck. We again tried to explain to him that we know how to stack wood and that he was mistaken. He began yelling at us, you know those people that get right in your face and bully you. He complained that we didn’t know how much work it was to split wood (we’ve split our own wood for years, yes, we knew). We wanted to keep the wood since it was mostly oak and nice and clean, so we agreed to take the wood naively hoping that the next load would fill our pallets to the four cord mark that we had paid for.

In total we received 2½ cords of wood for the price of four cords at the advertised price. OK, the wood was mostly oak so we didn’t mind paying a premium price, but we were still well over that premium. We called him back and demanded some of our money back or more wood. He agreed to bring us another ¾ cord. What we got was 3/8  core more, including useless pine and poplar.

We have never experienced such out right deception when buying firewood. It is too bad we cannot depend on local businessmen in these tyrannical times. Watch for flimflam when buying firewood. A full cord of wood is 4x4x8 tightly stacked.

Babette Lagnese

9 Pebble Road, Newtown                                      September 21, 2010