SUZANNE'S BRIDAL

My future daughter-in-law and I traveled 217 miles (one way) to purchase a wedding dress from Suzanne's Bridal. After ordering the dress, we were instructed to return in 2 weeks, after the dress had been received, so that the dress could be fitted and made ready for alterations. When we returned 2 weeks later, we were told that we should have made an appointment for the fitting, and would have to wait until Suzanne was available. Suzanne was able to do the fitting about 3 hours later. After the fitting was completed, we made an appointment to return in 2 weeks for the final fitting. 3 days before our appointment, my future daughter-in-law called the bridal shop to ask if we could change our appointment by one day (from Friday to Saturday), and was told that it was possible, and they would see us then. When we arrived, we found that the dress had not been touched since we had been there 2 weeks earlier, and the excuse that we were given was that they had forgotten to write us on the calendar, and that there had been fires in the nearby hills recently (?). We were forced to make another appointment for the following week, and make yet another trip to the shop. A few days before our appointment, I began calling the bridal shop to check the status of the dress (didn't want a repeat of the previous week), and each time was told that Suzanne would call me back. She never returned my calls, and when I continued to call until I reached her, she would evade my direct questions about how much of the alterations had been completed. When we arrived for our last visit, we found that the dress was done, but still didn't quite fit, and we were told that nothing more could be done, that they had let the dress out as much as they could. We were then told that the owner's sister-in-law had come up from the Bay Area to finish our dress, that she was a bridal dress designer, and that she normally gets $50-$75 per hour to do alterations, and that she had spent 6 hours on our dress. Since we had already paid for the dress and the alterations in advance, we didn't feel obligated to pay her sister-in-law for the service she had provided (which was a favor to the shop owner, not us). I had hoped that when we picked up the dress that she would offer to do something to offset the trip we had made unnecessarily the week before (if she had just called us, we could have rescheduled). She made no offers to us, and we left feeling lucky to have the dress in our hands and to be done with the whole affair.