Consumer Advocate Helps Make Losers Come Out Winners
Joan Cespuglio was shocked when she opened her bedroom closet one morning in June. Nearly every piece of clothing belonging to her and her husband had been discolored by triangular brown stains.
Attempts to remove the stains lightened them, but they didn’t go away. Cespuglio immediately suspected the brown plastic hangers she had just bought.
“I wanted to kill somebody,” Cespuglio recalled recently, doubling her fists. Instead, she called Giedra Gustas.
Outrage Her Raw Material
Gustas is a woman for whom outrage is raw material. She is Los Angeles County’s only full-time Department of Consumer Affairs investigator stationed in the San Fernando Valley. A month ago, because of Gustas’ efforts, the New York company that made the hangers paid Cespuglio $865 to replace the damaged clothes.
About 600 calls a month come into Gustas’ small office in Van Nuys. They come from tenants whose landlords won’t return their security checks, body builders whose health spas were vacated by night, owners of used cars whose rebuilt engines weren’t, winners of con men’s grand prizes who were losers, armchair shoppers whose mail orders never arrived.
“This can be a stressful job,” Gustas said from the far end of a long cigarette. “There’s usually unhappiness on the other end of that phone.”
Only about 20% of the calls result in cases for Gustas.
Sometimes another agency should handle the matter. Sometimes the customer has been at fault. Sometimes there isn’t enough to go on.
One caller last week wanted advice on whether to sue a supermarket chain for causing him and his wife emotional distress. A piece of meat, bought months before, had contained “some sort of sharp object.” No one was injured, but his wife now feels compelled to mash all her food, searching. Gustas explained, at length, that it is not always easy to say when emotional distress is worth a lawsuit. She advised the man to call a lawyer.
Overcharge Claim
Another man said he ordered an ice cream soda priced at $1.70 on a soda fountain menu. He complained bitterly that he had been charged $2.18. “He didn’t say whether the difference was tax or what,” Gustas said in an exasperated tone. Then, recovering her professional tone, she added, “We’ll talk to the soda fountain and get their version of it.”
The calls do not vary much from year to year, officials say. Computers and high-tech video equipment are the subject of an increasing number of complaints because more people are buying them. The Valley has many large apartment developments and, therefore, a lot of tenant complaints about landlords.
In September the 9-year-old consumer department figured that, of its first 30,000 complaints, the most common (2,000 each) came from tenants charging that landlords had refused to return security deposits and catalogue shoppers charging that mail-order houses had not delivered the goods.
Each of the department’s nine offices is managed by a county employee and has several volunteer helpers. A big part of the job is telling people how small-claims court works.
Gustas, 38, is a former high school home economics teacher who started with the department in 1978. Her supervisors say she has a hard nose and a soft heart. They describe her as one of their best. As she took one call after another one day last week, she quickly made each caller’s problem her own.
“She’s warm and caring,” said consumer Cespuglio.
Cespuglio, of course, has good reason to appreciate the investigator’s work. Her story shows how Gustas’ tenacity can pay off.
The manufacturer’s name was not on the offending clothes hangers. From the hardware store, Cespuglio got the name of the distributor. Then she got the name of the manufacturer, but no one she called offered much help. Out of desperation she took her problem to Gustas.
“Basically, the difficulty was getting through to the right person at the manufacturer,” Gustas said. “The manufacturer is a Los Angeles company owned by a New York company. I got through to the people in New York. A plain person has trouble getting through to the people in authority, but when I say I’m with the Los Angeles County Department of Consumer Affairs, people pay attention.
“You try from the bottom up, then you try from the top down. The people on the bottom tell you what happened in a situation because they were directly involved. You talk to the higher-ups because they’re less afraid for their position and they’re able to make decisions.”
The company’s insurance company decided to test the hangers. Gustas sent a hanger to the state agency that regulates dry cleaners, partly to see if the problem was part of a pattern of difficulties with the company.
Then the insurance company came back with its report: The wrong dye had been used on the hangers. The manufacturer accepted liability. A month ago Cespuglio got her check.
Suspicious Patterns
That bad batch of hangers appears to be an isolated one, but consumer investigators often find suspicious patterns. Occasionally they turn cases over to law-enforcement agencies for prosecution.
A couple of years ago there was the case of the TV renter whose response to customers’ complaints was to send them pizzas. Lorelei Echeverri, who ran the Van Nuys office in those days, said the man rented faulty sets to more than 40 people, operating under several company names.
“The giveaway was that the man’s first name was always the same,” said Echeverri, who now works downtown but was visiting the Van Nuys office last week. Also, the man always delivered the TVs between midnight and 3 a.m. and, when people called to complain, tried to mollify them by ordering pizzas sent to their homes.
“We don’t know where he got the TVs, but they were used, and he was a good enough mechanic to fix them just enough so they would work a little while. When you asked for a portable TV, he would take the 25-inch ‘I Love Lucy’ model and screw off the legs,” Echeverri said.
The man pleaded guilty to fraud, paid fines and restitution to his former customers and was ordered by a judge to get out of the TV rental business.
“He’s still doing business in the Valley, but he’s not renting TVs,” Echeverri said.
Lighting another cigarette, Gustas added, “And, don’t worry, we’re keeping a close eye on him.”
