Chad F

Review of Lone Pine Farms

I bought a 5 gallon (?) tub of black licorice ice ...

I bought a 5 gallon (?) tub of black licorice ice cream from them a couple of weeks ago for my mom and I (can't find it anywhere else) and after portioning out some for my mom to keep at her house and having a spoonful myself, planned to put the rest in our freezer. The next morning my mom asked me if I had eaten any, and whether I was feeling well. I had, in fact, been burping up sulfur-y like since the previous afternoon, and she told me she had been up all night with diarrhea and felt nauseated still. The color made it obvious that it was the ice cream that had caused it...I contacted Lone Pine that day to ask about returning it, and to let them know why in case there was some sort of bacteria issue. I ended up being "helped" by Denise, who was pretty abrupt with me and stated within two sentences that they would not be refunding my money. I was told I needed to return the ice cream to them and they would send it back to Umpqua for testing, and then deal with them directly. I thought that was kind of lame given that I bought it from them, it was not a special order since they had it in their freezer already etc. but she was pretty adamant about that. I did as I was told, although frankly I think that the proper thing to do would have been to either refund or at least offer a credit, considering they would most likely be credited by Umpqua (usual practice between vendors and distributors etc.)...Anyway, after several phone calls to Umpqua and a few days later, the test apparently came back fine, which was a relief considering what it could have been. The problem is that Umpqua didn't credit or refund either, and they said I should have dealt with that through Lone Pine!! It does make sense that this would be the standard procedure, but Denise at Lone Pine made it clear they should be left out of it. In fact, one of the Umpqua people told me they had mentioned to the owner, Dan, that if he refunded my money they would credit them back without issue, yet that was not offered to me at all. When I found that out, I called Lone Pine back, asked Denise why that happened and she denied knowing anything about a credit...she said she asked Dan and he didn't know either. To me, this had to be a lie, since they have carried Umpqua products for years, and I imagine they've probably had things sent back before and received credits--my situation can't possibly be the first??

Anyway, she was pretty rude to me and I found myself quickly losing my cool...She kept saying "You need to have Umpqua issue you a check and leave us out of it"...Nice way to stand behind the products you sell to people, and nice way to deal with customers. Clearly my mom was not going to be eating any more of that, and neither was I, and we were basically out the money, and the product, and got treated like crap and from what I can tell, lied to on some level. It would have been next to nothing for them to offer a credit on something else, which would have been fine, but they didn't even do that. Anyone who has shopped there should know that 25.00 wouldn't even be a full bag of produce, so it is just ridiculous the attitude they have.

My mom will never shop there again--she added up the four receipts she had from our trips there this year and it came to over 400.00 (not even including the ice cream)...I will never go there for anything ever again either.

Just ridiculous.