Complaint Review: D & K Products - Des Moines Iowa

My husband and I own a small lawn care business in Atlantic, Iowa. We get our supplies primarily from two different distributors. We buy our fertilizers from D & K Products out of Des Moines, Iowa.

At the end of March we place an order with D & K products for enough fertilizer to get us through the summer. We do this every year. They were kind of slow this year, but they finally did get us the fertilizer on April 28. Thank goodness we still had some left over from last year because we usually start the lawn treatments at the beginning of April.

Anyways the delivery guy was really nice and he left the fertilizer in my garage and handed me a packing slip and said that the invoice for the total would be sent out in a few days. I said fine and thanks. We have an account with them so it should have been no problem.

On May 5th, we had not received a bill yet, so my husband called and asked about the bill. The lady he spoke with said she would get it sent out that day. Ok, great we thought, then we can pay the bill.

Then comes May 12th. My husband and I went grocery shopping around 10:00 in the morning. He had some yards to tend to later so we went to the store early. We came home around aroung noon and as I was putting the groceries away my husband went outside to load up the truck to go work. He comes back in the house screaming, "Where is my fertilizer!" I thought it was a joke so I went outside to look, and lo and behold all but one opened bag was gone. I told him we had better call the police and report the theft. So we went inside and called the police. They said they would send someone out to take a report.

While waiting for the police, my husband called up D & K and asked if he could just come down and get some new bags of fertilizer (they usually ship it to you) because we needed it that day and he explained what happened to the lady at D & K.

She said that our fertilizer was not stolen. The delivery guy was in the area, and he came and took it back because we had not paid our bill. My husband just said thatnks and hung up. He was really mad. We called the police back and told them not to come because we found out who took the fertilizer.

After he told me what happened I was in shock. I could not believe that D & K Products did this. We have worked with them for several years. We had not even received a bill yet to pay. But with no warning, no letter, or no phone call and only two weeks after we got the fertizer, they took it upon themselves to come into our garage and repossess fertilizer! What the heck! Can you say illegal? Not only is that tresspassing, but it is an illegal repossession because we were not even given a chance to pay the bill.

I can understand when people don't pay their bills things do get repossessed but this was not the case here. We only had it for TWO WEEKS! You would think that D & K would have to send out a right to cure notice and then sue for replevin to get their fertilizer back AFTER we defaulted on the bill.

The point is WE NEVER GOT A BILL TO PAY, SO HOW CAN THEY JUST COME AND TAKE THE FERTILIZER BACK?! We didn't even know how much to pay. It did not have any prices on the packing slip.

I talked to my sister about it becuae she is in law school and asked her what we could do if anything. She said she thinks we have a case to sue D & K Products for loss of profits. Now we are going to have to find a new distributor and set up an account and that is going to take a while, so we can't even do the work on the yards we are contracted to take care of. We even called a rival company to do the yards we were scheduled to do today just so they could get done.

If anyone has any suggestions, my eyes and ears are open to them. Thanks for reading my complaint.

Robin

Atlantic, Iowa
U.S.A.