LS
Loane S
Active since Dec 2017
4
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0
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Reviews
4 reviews95 months ago
Standard Bank Zeerust a disgrace
Standing in the enquiries queue at Standard Bank Zeerust, this is the umpteenth time my housekeeper has come in to the branch, today I came in with her to see what’s going on and we’ve been standing here for 1 1/2 hours. An older woman has nearly fainted in the queue, one enquiries clerk has been flirting for 25 minutes with a customer at the counter, 2 of 3 cubicles are now empty. Branch manager Susan Moupi missing in action, some bureaucrat tells me we’ll have to wait as long as it takes. Worse than Home Affairs. TV blaring about how we love Africa - get out of the culture business, Standard Bank, and deal with the ****** queue.
106 replies
100 months ago
Automower only half working
The GPS module on the mower never worked after the PC board was replaced. See earlier review. This may not seem like a big deal, but on a large property the GPS is needed to assist with navigating around the lawn and returning to the charging station. So daily now the mower runs out of battery before it can find its charging station. So the damned thing can only run during the day when the gardener can keep track of its movements and carry it back to the charging station if it’s battery empties. The man from Husqvarna came out this week but I’ve heard nothing since. To boot, the Husqvarna ride-on is now on the blink despite being serviced religiously at least once a year. My experience with these Husqvarna products is, they’re great, but once you have the first problem, throw them away.
0 replies
100 months ago
Too bad to be true
I went to buy some irrigation pipe at Builders Express in Craighall Park. My initial impression was that the store was very neat and tidy: all the trolleys in the parking lot were neatly put away, the entrance was uncluttered and customers were moving freely, and the store itself was spotlessly clean. I would later see while waiting to be served that the shelves were neatly packed with stock and little notes apologizing if something was out of stock. The store layout is thoughtful and the product range is excellent. If only there were no staff in this store, this would be the best shop of any chain in the country. I walked up to the help desk to ask where I could find irrigation pipe. There was no one behind the counter, so I walked up to two women in Builders uniforms who were sitting at the desk. They were chatting and laughing with each other so I was shocked when they ignored me - no acknowledgement or anything, they just ignored me. I asked where the irrigation pipe is kept and one of the women, who I would later learn is a supervisor, pointed to the nursery. I trundled off to the nursery and, finding no one there, I walked back across the store and said to the lady, Okay let’s try again, there’s no one in the nursery, can someone help me with the irrigation pipe? I was further shocked to hear her call over to a man who works in the nursery, who had been standing perhaps 2 meters away, in plain view and within earshot, helping another customer. Sensing I would get no assistance from the woman I asked her to call the manager. Instantly, and with a definite sneer, she told me the manager was in a meeting, basically telling me to f@&k off. I barked at her that I didn’t want to know where the manager was, or what he was doing, I asked her to call the manager. The manager duly appeared, a very pleasant man. He was very apologetic. He found a nursery assistant to help me, and I was on my way, though strangely after a long wait as the nursery assistant took the other customer’s goods to the till, punched numbers into the till alternately with the cashier, and carried the goods to the customer’s car, repacking the car to fit a standard gardenia. Now I’m not the sort of person to roll over and accept a bad attitude: I will go to this store every week and seek out this woman, whose name is evidently Fila, and I will trouble her to help me until she is exhausted or fired, or I run out of money. I can tell you this is a Builders problem - no matter which Builders store I go to, the staff are always standing in groups chatting to each other, never in their sections, and totally put out to help a customer. If this were my business, I’d replace the whole staff with power-steering trolleys and robotic cashiers, pronto!
105 replies
101 months ago
Automower broke down in the middle of summer while on holiday
I am interested to see from this review whether Husqvarna works and whether Hello Peter works. I bought an Automower 450X in September. Stiff price (R57,000 all in). I’ve been running it on a large but straightforward garden - lawn plus trees and a pool. I was very impressed with its performance. There is no loud lawnmower going up and down, the lawn is cut continuously in a random, incremental pattern rather than the traditional scalping once or twice a week, and my petrol costs have dropped dramatically (there are still edges to do with a petrol brush cutter), not to mention the cost of repairs and maintenance of the two ride-on mowers (LTH2038 and RZ4621) which the staff just kept finding a way to break. But on Monday the Automower’s wheel motor stopped working. This in the middle of summer, the grass growing inches a week, at our holiday place 3 hours from Joburg, with a house full of visitors. I drove back to Joburg to drop the thing off with the dealer on Tuesday. Today is Thursday, the dealer closes for the year on Friday, and Husqvarna hasn’t fetched the machine from the dealer yet. So this morning out came the trusty RZ4621 zero-turn ride-on mower. One hell of a racket, uneven mowing, big petrol bill, hot as hell - back to square one. It won’t be a disaster if the robot isn’t back and we need to use the ride-on, but just 3 months of use before a major component failure, combined with the inconvenience of ferrying the thing back and forth to Joburg, makes me wonder if this machine is all it’s cracked up to be. I can’t pay R57,000 for something that works beautifully ... for 3 months. I’ll post an update as I go along. It did worry me too that, when the dealer hooked the Automower up to their diagnostic system, two other component failures aside from the wheel motor seem to have occurred. Too good to be true? I hope not. I love this machine, but I can’t have something that is unreliable.
105 replies
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1 Star
4 (100%)