We resent and vehemently reject the idea that you experienced a "bait and switch" from us at any point in time. No, you did not, not ever, period. As you plainly stated in your report, we performed numerous services for you over the course of a year and a half, all of which were quoted to you in writing ahead of time and the prices of which were honored at each and every service we performed at your home. A "bait and switch" is, by definition, the action, generally illegal, of advertising goods that are an apparent bargain, with the intention of substituting inferior or more expensive goods. We did no such thing, and the fact that you accuse us of acting with the intention of ripping you off is truly offensive to us. That being said, we do perform occasional (usually once per year) audits of our recurring accounts to make sure the charge for the service is commensurate with the costs involved with performing the work. If we discover that an account is out of line, the supervisor looks at all the account history and discusses the account with the team leader to determine why and make an adjustment. We then send out a letter with ample advance notice before a change takes place if a change is needed, so that if the client wishes to go in another direction for their cleaning services, the client can do so without an interruption to their service. The letter is boilerplate and includes a variety of possible causes for the price increase, one of which is: ”In some cases, a job may simply take us longer to complete at a high level of service than was expected at the time of the original estimate and is therefore associated with a labor cost that is unsustainable for us. We make every effort to perform the job within the time parameters we originally expect, but in some cases we have been unable to do this even after months of service." This is exactly what happened in the case of this member. Call this a miscalculation if you wish, but the truth is that you are a very demanding client with expectations somewhere in the "high" to "unreasonable" range who always demanded a little "extra" out of the team at your home. As such, the team continually had to spend extra time trying to make you happy, so when we did our pricing audit, your account was out of whack by, well, 22%. The size of the price increase that you found so outrageous is exactly commensurate with the amount of extra time we had to commit to your account over the last year and a half, which we also found outrageous. So you are right in saying that you should have heard from us about this sooner than a year and a half into your service. We didn't do it last year because your account had just begun and we hoped we could get your account under control, and we didn't do it over the course the year that followed because we don't nickel and dime our customers and look at every minute we spend on every job, because with the vast majority of our clients, it all averages out in the end. Ultimately, it is true that it was our mistake not to increase your prices before now, because we were wrong to think we could get the costs associated with your account under control. We could not and did not. When a client's job requires more to complete and therefore takes significantly longer than was anticipated initially, this causes numerous problems. First, it causes the team to have to rush to complete the job in the allotted time, which is completely counterproductive because it results in subpar service when you really want great service, which is why you placed such high expectations on the team in the first place. Second, it causes the team to be late to their subsequent appointments, which then results in subpar service when those clients scheduled after you, but who also paid for and deserve great service. Third, it causes the employees to be overworked and stressed out, which results in subpar service for everyone involved. Fourth, it causes the company to lose money, which also results in subpar service because we can't afford to maintain the quality of people and systems that our customers tell us are what make our company great. Please bear in mind, each of our eight house cleaning teams is booked at or very nearly to maximum capacity all the time. Our clients love our service and cancellations are rare. Out of our hundreds of recurring clients, the vast majority are priced right in line with where they should be and their pricing remains the same for years. And when we have to occasionally increase our pricing on a small number of clients, the majority of them stick with us because they know we are a company with integrity and a sincere desire to treat our clients the way we want to be treated. We regret that you do not feel this way about us and we find it unfortunate that you felt we should continue to do more for less, at our expense and your gain. We do not, however, apologize for insisting on charging a fair price that enables us to offer great service to all of our clients and allows us to reach our goal of being the best service company our clients have ever invited to their homes. Please note, we do not ask our clients to sign contracts for our service. The quality of our service is our contract. However, if at any point in time, a client wants to change or discontinue their service, the client is free to do so. Likewise, if an account isn't working for us because the client continually insists by way of extraordinarily high expectations that we spend more time than is scheduled to do the job, we reserve the right to present you with an adjusted pricing proposal commensurate with the workload you are placing on the team, sent to you with ample advance notice and complete with the open invitation for you to seek out another cleaning service if the price change is not within your budget. The fact that you took our courteous and fair approach to dealing with this problem as an opportunity to disparage us on Angie's List is, honestly, pretty sad. Therefore, our response to you has been vigorous. Nevertheless, we wish you the best and hope you find a cleaning service that will provide the level of service you desire at a price that is not tough for you to swallow, as you say.