BUYER BEWARE: La Vita Cigars St. Charles IL

[stinkhead]

NEVER do business with La Vita cigars in St. Charles.  I used to have a members locker there which had an annual fee of $250.  I was out of town for a week and when I returned several boxes had mold on the feet and mold on the outside of the boxes because the humidity was too high.  I informed the manager and he pulled all the the stuff from my locker and put it in his private cabinet to watch the stuff that had not been infested with mold, and that they would figure out some way to reconcile the $500 I was going to lose on my moldy cigars.

A week passes and the manager had still not called me back about what they are going to do so I called.  The manager told me that it was out of his control now and it would be up to the owner what he was going to do to solve the problem, and the owner would call me back tommorrow.  Needless to say he never called... I called three times a week for three weeks and "conveniently" the owner had just left every time I called.  Finally after three weeks of this the manager finally said the owner would be around and he would talk to me if I came in in person because the owner did not want to talk over the phone.  So today I drove the hour to the shop to talk to the owner and you know what he tells me??? He said and I quote, "I cant replace the boxes you lost because it would be bad business for me to pay for them."  When I told him his staff GARUNTEED MY STOCK WOULD BE IN PERFTECT CONDITION, he said that it was not his fault that the humidor didn't work properly and that he would not do anything about it.  When he said that I demanded a refund of my locker and told him that if this is how you treat your customers I want nothing to do with this store or the "la vita family" that I was supposedly part of. 

If this was an online trader it would be scumbag list for sure.

[Bunker]

Sucks dude.

[AZCigarNut]

Good job outing them, brother,  If it were me, I'd jump on BOTL, CF, HCF, CA, ICC, Asylum, etc... and plaster that all over the net!

[jasdav16]

I have to say I think the worst part of that story is having to wait 3 weeks to hear that the owner wasn't going to pay for them when he KNEW he wasn't going to offer any restitution from the get go.  They were just hoping you'd drop it and not have to argue over it.

Weak.

[jb]

And that shit right there is why I've never understood the locker thing.  No thanks I will keep mine at the house.

That being said, I think you have some recourse here.  A nice letter from an attorney may do some good.  If you don't want to do that I would advise another conversation or a letter telling the owner how you have no choice but to inform everyone you can in person and on the internet about his bad business.  Tell him you would much rather tell everyone a good story about how he made it right.

[Fuente Fan]

That's just not right.

[TheMuskyDude]

Cigar lockers are just flat out a bad idea.  Don't have anything in them you aren't prepared to lose if you really want one.  I had one with a buddy years ago and ended up losing a bunch of awesome cubans to beetles.  Luckily we caught it in time to salvage most of them, but that was the end of that.

[TheMuskyDude]

And I can't understand why you'd have one 1 hour away???

I used to work in St. Charles, go to Bull n Bear instead, but no lockers there.  :bangin:

[gomez]

That is a bullshit move, and no way to run a business.  There has to be some expectation that the owner will maintain the proper temp/rh for the price paid. This dude is like the slum lord of the B&M shops.

[Grammaton Cleric]

What is the point of a cigar locker if it won't be properly maintained? I'm not sure what the selling point is. What service are they providing? Security for your cigars? You'd be better off just putting a humidor in a safety deposit box.....