Just TeeJay's Blog

If you want to have the short version of this…. it is: don’t do business with Waste Management. Ever.

Here is the longer version:

I have had Waste Management doing the garbage pick up service at my business for almost 8 years. I have had no problems with their service. To the best of my knowledge they have never had a problem with me.

In May of 2015 our service came up for renewal. I was sent (and subsequently signed) a service agreement for the next 36 months. The monthly total for service is indicated to be $190.25.

When the bills came they were slightly higher – “taxes and fees” sort of thing…. but nothing that I found unusual or out of line.

This summer my bills suddenly got to be substantially higher. They went from the around $200 that I had been paying to over $400. Obviously I found this odd and I reached out to them to ask why. The person I spoke with started out with “many customers mistakenly believe that the signed Service Agreement means that their pricing will remain stable through the length of the contract”. Yes, this is indeed what I had thought. He then explained a lot of things over the next several conversations. Most of them involved him dodging questions and telling me that he needed to speak with his Pricing Manager to see if he could do anything for me.

After multiple phone calls back and forth I will summarize for you. They refuse to readjust my pricing AT ALL unless I am willing to sign a new 36 month contract. The new 36 month contract will contain this exact same clause that the last one did.

This clause allows them to jack the prices as much as they see fit to keep their profits where they believe that they should be. They assure me that normally my prices won’t increase more than 10% per year – but in NONE of the conversations with anyone that I spoke with over there could they explain why my bill more than doubled a year and a half into my Service period. They are not willing to put in writing that the prices won’t increase more than 10% in a year again. Obviously I declined to sign another contract.

I inquired about a myriad of ways that I could alter my services to try to bring the price down. Most of them were explained to me that they would be a violation of my service agreement and I would be charged the fee for breaking the contract (which is astronomically high as well). As a last ditch effort I asked if I could bring my agreement down to one tote being emptied once a month (with the thought in my head that I could hire another service provider to actually carry our waste away). Obviously other people have tried this as when he came back from speaking to his Pricing Manager he was VERY specific that if there was any evidence on my property that I was having another service provider haul anything away Waste Management would sue me.

Sued for trying to not get charged double for my service for absolutely no reason.

They still may try to sue me for posting this information publicly on here which is why I’ve blocked out the details of my account. It wouldn’t take too much research to figure it out – but I can’t do anything about what they are doing to me. Perhaps I can keep some other individual (or business) from signing up with them and winding up in this situation.

I will pay them for the remainder of my contract. I will notify them in writing between 90-180 days of my intent to cancel service. I will honor my agreement with them. I’m not happy about it. I do read contracts before I sign them. Nothing in the clause above sounded fishy to me and I wouldn’t have imagined that a company would do something like this randomly to a business.

Please do not use Waste Management. Please forward this information to anyone you can think of. I have told this story to other people and have been made fun of for signing up with them in the first place. That was my error and I need to own it. For 8 years it wasn’t a problem.

Below is this month’s bill. The only altering I have done of this document and the ones above is the obliteration of my personal info and the signature of the salesperson from Waste Management.

At least I am a business that can absorb an extra $200 a month bill. I would hate to see this happen to an individual or a not-for-profit that would be devastated by this kind of additional billing.

I am bitter, but more than that I am sad. I am sad that this particular business has decided to treat clients like this and to authorize their representatives to speak to human beings the way I was spoken to during the course of these conversations. I hope by sharing my humiliation I can save someone else from this experience.

~ by justteejay on September 7, 2017.

Posted in You Can't Make This Shit Up
Tags: garbage, garbage service, waste, waste management