A.J. Perri: Beware!

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Bamboozled: Special Report

COMPANY ACCUSED OF ‘SCARE TACTICS’

Customers say A.J. Perri tried to sell them services they didn’t need

Karin Price Mueller
bamboozled@njadvancemedia.com
Richard Gomulka of Lanoka Harbor said A.J. Perri Plumbing, Heating and Cooling used fear tactics to get him to purchase a new boiler and water tank. Here he is pictured along with a new boiler that had been purchased some time after his dealing with Perri. Russ DeSantis/NJ Advance Media for The Star-Ledger

At the home of Christina Marold’s grandparents, A.J. Perri workers left a mess after digging up the basement to replace a sewer line, Marold said. Christina Marold

Want to read more?

Kevin Perri’s full statement is available here: bit.ly/ ajperri-sl

From left, Jack Sesulka, 1, Patrick Sesulka, Chase Sesulka, 3, and Brittany Sesulka, at home in Hillsborough. They said A.J. Perri came to unclog a toilet in 2014, but the technician said the couple had mud in a sewer line. The couple asked a contractor friend to give a second opinion, and he said there was no problem with the line and cleared the clog for $60, they said. Keith A. Muccilli/NJ Advance Media for The Star-Ledger

As consumers, we fear and dread the up-sell.
We hate when salespeople of any kind fool us into buying services and products we don’t need.
Or scare us into thinking if we don’t act, we’ll put our families at risk.
But one of New Jersey’s largest plumbing, heating and air conditioning companies has institutionalized those tactics to the detriment of customers, according to interviews with two current employees, two former employees and dozens of homeowners who have had contact with the firm, Tinton Falls-based A.J. Perri.
In the three weeks since Bamboozled profiled an 86-yearold man who said A.J. Perri pressured him to take a $9,500 up-sell for unneeded work, two dozen customers came forward with similar stories via email, as did dozens more on NJ.com and on NJ.com’s Facebook page. And employees who are unhappy with the company’s practices have spoken out.
The employees said — and consumer stories claim — the company regularly sells jobs that aren’t needed, uses fear tactics to get customers to act immediately and teaches employees how to offer the most expensive solution first.
Internal emails show sales incentives, and a sales script coaches company reps to offer jobs for which “money is no object.”
The up-sell environment is fostered by a commission-based sales structure, with low-rung employees who respond to calls and are awarded bonuses for persuading customers to accept additional diagnostic services, which sometimes lead to recommendations for more expensive jobs, the current and former employees said.
Sales reps who are paid on commission follow up, sometimes recommending exten sive work that is later deemed by second and third estimates to be significantly overpriced or unnecessary, employees and consumers said.
“They reward top salesmen with bonuses, trips to Mexico, dinners, etc.,” one current employee said. “They do not reward non-sales or telling someone everything is okay.”
All of the employees spoke on the condition of anonymity. The current employees said they feared losing their jobs. The former employees said they did not want their names associated with A.J. Perri.
Bamboozled confirmed the employee identities through document verification, social media searches and cross-checking internal information with other employees.
A.J. Perri President Kevin Perri responded on behalf of the company and its Tennessee-based parent, American Residential Services, saying customers are free to choose some, all or none of the proposed service options.
When asked about salespeople using scare tactics, Perri said, “Absolutely not, and we will not tolerate that behavior.”
Customers let Bamboozled know how they feel about the company, coming forward in unusually high numbers. And while we occasionally receive internal documents from company insiders none of our reports has prompted this many to step forward.
Perri declined to comment specifically on the cases highlighted by Bamboozled.
The state has taken interest in the claims made by consumers.
“The Division of Consumer Affairs is concerned about the allegations against A.J. Perri,” a spokeswoman for the agency said. “The Board of Examiners of Master Plumbers plans to discuss the allegations during its meeting on Feb. 23, and the Division encourages consumers to report any allegations of unscrupulous sales tactics by this company.”
WARNED OF A ‘DANGEROUS SITUATION’
In early 2013, PSE&G diagnosed small fractures in Tina Snedeker’s furnace. The rep said it wasn’t an emergency, but that the unit should eventually be replaced because the fractures could grow and leak carbon monoxide, Snedeker said.
That fall, the family decided to replace the furnace, water heater and air conditioner before the next winter, so they made appointments with several companies for estimates.
Two sales reps from A.J. Perri were the first to arrive at the Mercer County home, she said.
The salesmen took measurements and discussed price points, then went outside to give the couple privacy to discuss the offer, Snedeker said.
They decided they still wanted additional estimates before making a decision.
“When the salesmen came back into the house and we told them we would be in touch, one salesman showed us a picture of a furnace that caught on fire due to fractures in the furnace and stressed that we could be putting ourselves into a dangerous situation,” Snedeker said.
“This was avery uncomfortable experience that left all of us concerned and suspicious of A.J. Perri’s true intentions with a 94-yearold man and his bank account.”
Christina Marold

Then the salesman declared there was unsafe carbon monoxide in the basement, she said. But the home had several carbon monoxide detectors, including one 10 feet from the furnace, Snedeker said. None had ever gone off.
When the couple said they weren’t ready to sign, the salesman said Kevin Perri would want to know why they didn’t get the sale, she said.
“After they left, my husband and I commented to each other that an elderly person could easily be convinced to purchase immediately out of fear of a fire,” Snedeker added. “We did not appreciate them trying to scare us into a contract.”
‘I WAS REALLY SCARED’
Another customer said that when he called A.J. Perri for a pre-winter checkup of his 20-year-old boiler in the fall of 2014, he was told it was emitting dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.
“I was really scared at this point because the supervisor was telling me how deadly it can be,” said Richard Gomulka, who lives in Lanoka Harbor.
But during a second opinion, Gomulka said, a different plumber said the system was perfectly safe and that Gomulka was being “ripped off.” The new plumber also told Gomulka he could replace the system for less than half of the 2,500 A.J. Perri price.
Gomulka said he visited company headquarters to cancel.
“They tried to use their scare tactics on me again,” he said. “It didn’t end there. (They) called me the next day and tried to scare me again.”
One employee said fear is a common tactic in company sales.
“The sales tactics are all fear-based — fear that the problem can get worse or cause damage,” the employee said.
Christina Marold said her grandparents, who are both in their 90s, called A.J. Perri because their Somerset home’s water drained slowly.
It was February 2015, and a salesman told the couple a blockage was caused by a crushed castiron pipe under the basement floor, Marold said.
They’d need to excavate the floor and dig 2 feet down and 35 feet across, Marold said.
Marold’s grandfather agreed to the 8,505 job.
The work started the next day, Marold said, because the salesman warned the blockage could worsen and cause overflows.
“(My father) said he didn’t have any choice because he’d have no water, no shower,” said the homeowner’s daughter, Erika Marold, who is also Christina’s mother. “He was scared that the laundry machine could be spewing up water and the sinks could be overflowing.”
Erika Marold said she tried to see the damage, but workers said they didn’t dig down all the way to the old pipes so there was nothing to see. Instead, workers connected new pipes to both ends of the system above the older pipes, Marold said.
In the end, the family said, the house was covered in cement dust. A.J. Perri agreed to pay a$620 house cleaning bill, documents show. It lowered the balance due by $800 and replaced tools, including a staple gun, the family said were missing from the basement.
Later, Erika Marold said, her father didn’t understand why the company replaced the whole pipe rather than dig up and splice in a new section at the blockage location.
“This was a very uncomfortable experience that left all of us concerned and suspicious of A.J. Perri’s true intentions with a 94-year-old man and his bank account,” Christina Marold said.
THE UP-SELL
While sales scripts, commissions and bonuses for salespeople are not unusual, former and current A.J. Perri employees say — and documents show — the company gives incentives to up-sell what could be a simple service call.
For example, one internal email explained a contest for “sales leads,” while another told employees to pay special attention to routine service calls.
An employee said the goal of routine service visits “is to find as much as possible wrong with the heating or cooling system that the tech gets a heating and cooling salesman in the home to price out a new system.”
Technicians receive a $75 bonus each time they secure appointments for salespeople to come with additional diagnostic tests, two employees said. The salespeople are then incentivized to sell more expensive work, they said, noting that repair jobs are regularly priced high so replacing an entire system appears to make more financial sense to the customer. Customer accounts support that allegation.
One customer shared with Bamboozled an A.J. Perri “Plumbing Price Book” that was inadvertently left at the customer’s home by a company employee in December 2014. It included a script for salespeople, who are paid on commission, to write up six options for consumers. “The 1st one is what I would do if it was my house and money was no object,” the script instructed salespeople to say.
The script’s authenticity was verified by one former and one current employee.
Kevin Perri, the company president, said when the company performs an in-depth inspection, its duty is to diagnose problems but also to warn about issues that may arise in the future. That’s why reps, who he said undergo background checks and drug-testing prior to being hired, and who are required to “participate in mandatory ethics and senior-sensitivity training,” present so many options, he said.
One current and one former employee disputed this, saying there has never been ethics or senior-sensitivity training before last week.
In his statement, Perri also said:
“If you call us to fix your leaky pipe or repair your furnace that isn’t heating, but we don’t also tell you that you should consider replacing your worn-out water heater or upgrade to an energy efficient AC unit to save money on your utility bills, we would have done you a disservice,” Perri said. “That is why we provide our customers with a comprehensive diagnosis and repair options to address the problem they are experiencing, as well as longterm replacement options to prevent bigger issues from occurring or to make their home more energy efficient.”
Perri didn’t address sales incentives when asked.
“Incentives to sell are very clear,” a current employee said, confirming the internal emails were authentic. “Salesmen are on a straight commission structure, so even if they are being sent to a house with a brand new sewer, they are expected to close some sort of sale or problem.”
OTHER PRACTICES
Some customers said A.J. Perri recommended expensive work that was later deemed unnecessary by other professionals called in for second estimates.
Brittany Sesulka said she called A.J. Perri to her Hillsborough home when she and her husband couldn’t clear a toilet clog in September 2014.
The rep, Sesulka said, decided it was a bigger problem. He would send someone with a camera to examine the sewer line.
“The other guy came with the camera and it was the most dramatic thing I’d ever seen,” Sesulka said. “He talked like it was a war scene. He was snaking and said, ‘Wait! There’s mud in the line!’ ”
The rep said there was definitely a crack, and the fix would cost about $8,000, Sesulka said.
“Lucky for us, we had a friend who was in construction,” she said. “He came and snaked it and we never had another issue with it. He said there was no mud in the line.”
The cost for the fix? $60.
Avital Spiegel said her 85-year-old father, a widower with Alzheimer’s disease, hired A.J. Perri in 2014 to do annual service calls at his home.
One day, Spiegel said, she learned her dad had an appointment for a salesman to discuss the replacement of his heating and air-conditioning systems. While the systems were old, Spiegel said, they both worked just fine.
Spiegel said her brother was there for the appointment and he explained his dad didn’t need any new equipment.
Her brother asked for any sales calls to stop, saying their dad suffered from Alzheimer’s, Spiegel said.
But a month or two later, Spiegel said, she called her dad when A.J. Perri was at the house. Her father said he had agreed to an $8,000 job for the heat and air systems. He paid $2,000, and the rest was to be financed, she said.
She said she felt the company took advantage of her father.
Spiegel said she called the company to complain, and within a week, it agreed to return the $2,000 and forgive the rest of the bill.
Consumers can file complaints with Consumer Affairs online, njconsumeraffairs.gov or at (973) 504-6200. We’ll keep you posted on any state investigations that follow.
Have you been Bamboozled? Reach Karin Price Mueller at bamboozled@njadvancemedia.com


Yes, they try to oversell.

I have an A.C. Perri A/C maint contract. The guy came in and told me that furnace blower motor is in imminent demise. To get a new one ASAP. I was quoted 1300 to replace after their "discounts."

I decided to see what a new furnace costs. Mine is 18 years. Their salesman came in, offered me a new furnace at $7500 but with good customer and other discounts got it down to $5500. He told me not just the blower motor but the furnace would fail real soon. He pointed out the white powder in the exhaust pipe as an indication of a sick furnace.

Its all bs. I had two other companies look at my furnace. They said its OK, would last several more years.

The white powder is nothing (googled it).


I've had nothing but success with them. Started out with them in Maplewood when my furnace would not go on on the coldest night of the winter. The local plumber I used all 8 years of my residency (and who made a good deal of money from me) would not answer the phone and never called me back. I called 2 other local plumbers -- same thing. AJ Perri came at 12:30am that night, even though I wasn't a customer, and fixed my furnace (there was a defective valve) -- and they did not even charge me for an emergency service call. I've given them my business ever since in my new home (boiler, central air, hot water heater).


BAMBOOZLED

Plumbing firm slapped with record $100Kfine

After state inquiry into complaints of deception, A.J. Perri is ordered to reform business practices

Plumbing giant A.J. Perri has been hit with a $100,000 fine — the largest ever levied by New Jersey’s plumbing board— and has agreed to reform its deceitful business practices under a consent order reached with the state Attorney General’s Office.

>span class="Fid_4">Bamboozled spoke to dozens of customers, along with current and former A.J. Perri employees, who painted a portrait of predatory sales practices fueled by a commission- based sales structure and pressure to meet sales goals.

In the investigation’s wake, the state’s Board of Master Plumbers opened its own inquiry, ultimately receiving complaints from 30 people, some of whom were profiled in the Bamboozled investigation.

According to the consent order between the board and Michael Perri, a minority owner and A.J. Perri’s licensed master plumber, the company “repeatedly engaged in use of deception and misrepresentation” in violation of the state’s Uniform Enforcement Act.

A.J. Perri also failed to maintain video footage of jobs and document findings, a violation of state plumbing license regulations, the order said.

>span class="Fid_4"

>span class="Fid_4">Attorney General Christopher Porrino said A.J. Perri technicians “used overly-aggressive and deceitful tactics to coerce consumers, many of them senior citizens, into paying for plumbing repairs and services that were unnecessary or far exceeded what was needed.”

“This settlement not only imposes a record civil penalty befitting A.J. Perri’s egregious misconduct, it requires the company to make substantive changes in its oversight and management of technicians to ensure that consumers receive transparency and honesty from A.J. Perri, as required by law,” Porrino said.

Kevin Perri, the president of A.J. Perri, said the company thanks the board for its “thorough investigation.”

“While we disagree with the Board’s findings, and categorically deny that our business in any way promotes, endorses or encourages any behavior against the best interest of our customers, we are pleased that the Board agrees that this matter should be concluded and both of us can put it behind us,” Perri said in a written statement to Bamboozled.

HOW IT HAPPENED

>span class="Fid_4"> emails and photos, alleged the company sold an $11,500 sewer line to Karl Baer, 86, when only a spot repair was needed.

>span class="Fid_4">Another consumer said her grandparents, in their 90s, were scared into agreeing to an $18,000 job that required ripping up their basement floor and digging 2 feet down and 35 feet across to replace a supposedly crushed cast iron pipe. Family members questioned why the company replaced the whole pipe rather than only replace a section where a blockage was found.

Others reported they were told their heating equipment was giving off hazardous carbon monoxide, which second opinions showed was not true.

Internal emails were also provided to Bamboozled by current and former employees.

One showed a contest for “sales leads,” while another told employees to pay special attention to routine service calls, the goal of which was “to find as much as possible wrong with the heating or cooling system that the tech gets a heating and cooling salesman in the home to price out a new system,” the employee said.

“They reward top salesmen with bonuses, trips to Mexico, dinners, etc.,” another employee said. “They do not reward non-sales or telling someone everything is OK.”

>span class="Fid_4"

>span class="Fid_4">When the board asked company representatives about specific consumer complaints, it learned video of the sewer and water lines of multiple customers had been recorded over and was not available for the state to examine, nor were there photos to substantiate the recommended work. In other cases, work was recommended by commissioned camera technicians who were not licensed master plumbers, and the company had no notes to confirm whether the recommendations or videos were reviewed by a licensed master plumber.

Attorney General Porrino said at the board’s behest, prior to the settlement, A.J. Perri provided full or partial restitution to affected consumers. In all, 24 of the customers who complained to the state received full or partial refunds, the consent order said. The others had not given any money to A.J. Perri.

“We thank Bamboozled for bringing this situation to light and for encouraging consumers to come forward with their complaints against A.J. Perri,” Porrino said. “The information they provided to the Division helped us take appropriate action to put a stop to this kind of deceptive business

SEE PLUMBER, 9


“I’m very happy that the state got involved and they made new rules and regulations forA.J. Perri to follow,” said Karl Baer, a homeowner whose purchase of an$11,500 sewer line led to the investigation into the company. TomBrenner, for The Star-Ledger


Karin Price Mueller

bamboozled@njadvancemedia.com

PLUMBER

FROM 18

practice and to protect consumers, especially vulnerable senior citizens, from being victimized like this in the future.”CONSUMERPROTECTIONS

Beyond the fine and reprimand, the agreement offers important consumer protections for future A.J. Perri customers.

All camera inspections of sewer or water lines will be kept for four years and made available to the state if a complaint comes in.

A. J. Perri will have to supply written options for recommended work, rather than only verbal ones, and consumers will have to sign the form.

Any work recommended by a Perri employee who is not a licensed master plumber will have to be approved by a licensed master plumber before any work can begin. The licensed master plumber’s recommendation must also be in writing.

If the state receives future complaints, the company agrees to respond in writing within 30 days to both the consumer and to the state. The consent order spells out in detail how the complaints should be handled, including binding arbitration with the Division of Consumer Affairs if the consumer is unsatisfied with the company’s response. Plus, future violations related to senior citizens will result in fines of $10,000 each.

Consumers who complained about their experiences welcomed news of the consent order.

“I’m glad. I’m very happy that the state got involved and they made new rules and regulations for A.J. Perri to follow,” said Baer, the homeowner whose story launched the investigation. “At least people have recourse now.”

Baer said it’s ironic that he continues to get calls from the company, for example, offering service for his furnace.

“I want nothing to do with them,” he said.

Avita l Spiegel, the daughter of the Alzheimer’s patient, called it a win but said it’s not enough.

“To think that someone was willing and able to take advantage of him due to his age is nothing short of a criminal offense,” she said.

Richard Gomulka, who claimed A.J. Perri told him his boiler was releasing dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, praised the agreement.

“I hope that this will deter other companies from doing this to other consumers in the future,” he said. “I am only sorry that nobody went to jail for these fraudulent practices.” Have youbeenBamboozled? ReachKarin Price Mueller at bamboozled@njadvancemedia.com. Mueller is also the founder of njmoneyhelp.com.

Copyright (c)2018 Star Ledger, Edition 1/15/2018


"And that, my friend, is why... I HATE those guys!"

-s.




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