Another Reason Altoona Sucks

When I bought Bridget’s engagement ring, I purchased it from a place called Kranich’s Jewelers in State College. So when we got married we went back there to get my wedding band. We picked out a white platinum ring (for durability) with a brushed center section.

With the warranty that our rings have, we are required to have them looked at once every six months by someone at a Kranich’s store. In 2002, the first time we had our rings inspected, we went to the store in Altoona since it was mildly convienent in our trip to my parent’s house. While there, the woman that inspected my ring mentioned how scratched up it had become in only 6 bmonths. I told her I was hard on rings and it was only going to get worse.

After inspecting the rings, she took them into the back to be polished. When she returned, she held out her hand and we took our rings. Mine had returned with a mirror finish. She had thought that the brushed center was scratches and proceeded to buff out the brushing. We politely freaked out and asked her to fix it. She stated that only the jeweler could fix it, but being a Sunday, he wasn’t in the store. We could leave the rings and pick them up tomorrow. Very useless if you live 2 hours away.

We decided to live with it and figured we’d get it fixed some other time. It was about 8 months ago that we finally got lucky enough that the jeweler was in the store when we were at the Johnstown location. The guy fixed the brushing in about 10 minutes, it looked like my original ring, and I was quite pleased. This is the best thing to happen in Johnstown in a long time.

This past weekend we went to a birthday party in Duncansville for a friend’s child. While there, we decided to skip over to Kranich’s to have the rings looked at again. Sure enough, another girl buffed out the brushing on my ring. We asked her why she did it and she exclaimed that it was scratched and that was the only way to get the scratches out. We proclaimed that my ring was significantly different now and this had happened before. When we said that she had buffed out the brushing she pointed at the ring and said, “you can still kind of see it.” We made it clear that we weren’t happy about it.

My main worry is concern for the integrity of the ring. If these toolbags keep buffing my ring down and then I have to have it rebrushed, it slowly wears the metal away, thereby making the ring weaker. I’m hard on jewelry so we got white platinum for a reason. I don’t want to break this thing.

They offered the standard jeweler fix, but of course he wasn’t there. The jeweler is there on Saturdays until 4:30 (we arrived at 4) but he had cut out around 2pm. They would glady have him fix it and mail the ring to us. I said that there was no way that my wedding ring was going in the U.S. Mail. We went back and forth asking why she had ruined my ring (again) and never came to any sort of resolution. We told them that we would never come back to the Altoona location and we left.

No one apologized for ruining my ring (again.) As far as I was concerned they didn’t offer a reasonable resolution to the problem. We won’t be going back there. We’ll head to Johnstown from now on. At least the jeweler there can fix the problems that the Altoona store creates.