I had been reluctant to order from Platinum Stages after all the bad things I'd read on here regarding their customer service, but they had the exact thing I wanted: a permanent brass spinning pole. I couldn't find much information on the few other companies that offered this, so I decided to just go with PS.
My pole arrived last Thursday and I called a friend to come over and help me install it. While I waited for her I opened up the boxes and put a few parts together and I decided to stand the pole up just to check out how it looked in the room. Much to my surprise, it was already too tall to fit, and that was with only half of the parts. Oh, in case you're confused, there's the pole, two flanges which are the plates that bolt into the ceiling and floor, and two couplers which insert into the ends of the pole and then connect into the flanges. When I tried to stand my pole up it was with just the couplers attached, and the flanges would need an additional two inches of space at least. So I called Platinum Stages and told the girl on the phone what was going on and she said she would have someone call me back ASAP. This guy called an hour later and told me to take the pole to a hardware store and get it cut down to size. He wasn't even offering an apology or explanation or anything, so I was like "Well why did this happen? I paid you over $300 and I expected to get the right size of pole for my money?". He got all pissy and tried to tell me that it was MY fault, that I ordered the wrong size! That is bullshit! These are the exact words from the website:
"How to calculate Pole size needed: Measure your floor to ceiling height. Round down to the nearest inch. We will take care of the rest."
The height of my ceiling is 108 inches, so that's what I ordered. First he denied that it says this on the website, then he said something about how they must've thought I was ordering it with the extra space needed in mind. By the way, the pole they sent was 107 1/4 inches, which seems like a totally random length. After some arguing he finally agreed to refund $20 to my credit card. He told me to cut the pole to exactly 105 inches, three inches shorter than my ceiling, and it should work. So my friend drove me to Lowe's and a nice boy in the plumbing department cut my pole down free of charge.
I was praying that everything else would just go smoothly, but no. We got back to my apartment and tried to put everything together, but when we tried to insert the coupler into the end of the pole that had been cut it wouldn't fit! The device that the boy at Lowe's used to cut the pole had made it just slightly concave at the end, so it was now like one millimeter too small and no matter how hard we tried to jam it in it would not go. After an hour of trying I called Platinum Stages again and was planning to ask them to exchange my pole for one that was actually the right size from the start. The guy (same pissy one from earlier) was giving me some suggestions on how to get the coupler into the pole and while I was on the phone with him I happened to glance at the instruction sheet that came with the pole. Okay first of all, step 1 says "If you ordered a pole with your spinning kit...skip to step 3" and obviously I had, so I had never even bothered to read step 2, which says "If you are adapting your current pole to work with the spinning kit cut your pole 3 7/8" shorter than your floor to ceiling measurement". That's right 3 and 7/8 inches! So I said to the guy on the phone "Wait a minute, the instructions say 3 7/8 inches but you told me three inches. Which one is it?" and he went off on me, saying all this bullshit like "Well if the instructions say 3 7/8 inches then that's what it is. I thought you had a different pole. We sell so many products, how was I supposed to know which pole you had? You shouldn't have listened to me, that's why we give you instructions. You need to follow the instructions. It's not my fault if you can't follow some simple instructions..." and on and on! Ooh I was SO PISSED! He finally agreed to refund another $20.
So my friend and I drove BACK to Lowe's and the nice boy cut another 7/8 of an inch off my pole and I bought a file to file down the inside edges of the pole and finally we were able to jam the coupler in.
But the nightmare isn't over yet! When I got online the next day I checked my bank statement because I wanted to see if Platinum Stages had refunded me that $40. When I bought the pole the total was $305, plus $50 for shipping. So $355, right? I mean, that's what it said on the checkout page and I had to click to confirm my order and all that. Yet according to my bank statement they actually charged me $405!!! So I called again and the girl on the phone told me that it's an extra $50 shipping for poles over nine feet. First of all it doesn't say that anywhere on the website, and second, my pole was actually just under nine feet (nine feet=108 inches, the pole they sent was 107 1/4). But then she said some bullshit about how for calculating shipping they take the length of the pole and add the width of the pole, so according to them my pole was approximately nine feet and two inches. I pointed out that the pole they were supposed to send would've been 104 1/8 inches, and then if you add the two inch width that's still under nine feet. She reluctantly agreed to refund the extra $50.
I didn't even bother arguing over the fact that I paid an extra $20 for a nickel plated bottom flange, and instead they sent one that's painted a sort of gold-ish color, and the paint is all chipped off like it was dropped about five times. In retrospect I wish I had demanded that money back too, but at the time I already had too much to deal with.



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