Sugar Shock: Dessert Food Truck Sends Bride-To-Be Vulgar Email
A Long Island bride-to-be who hoped for a sweet ending to her upcoming wedding has been left with a horrible taste in her mouth from a beyond-nasty note she received from a New York City sweets purveyor.
Amanda De Pascale, who will be married in February, said she discovered Sweetery NYC, a dessert food truck company, through Google after being inspired by a different sweets-based food truck at a bridal expo display in September.
"My fiancée and I wanted something a little different for our wedding and we thought it would be so fun to have a food truck for our guests to get little sweets," she told FoxNews.com. "They were really going to be our wedding favors."
She said she sent a request for a quote to Sweetery from an email address she created solely for wedding purposes (which she didn't check on a daily basis), and the Manhattan-based company came back with a figure of $2,900 for a few hours — far beyond the bride-to-be's price range. De Pascale said she and her fiancée were "paying for the wedding ourselves, so I was disappointed but I didn't think much of it."
But Sweetery, which has a four-star Yelp review and touts clients like Food Network and American Express, wouldn't take no — or no response — for an answer.
"They kept calling me, multiple times an hour, then would stop for a few hours, then call back again," De Pascale said.
"I told them, 'I can't talk right now, I'm at work,' and hung up. But he continued to call and call for about two weeks," she said, referring to Sweetery NYC co-founder and owner Grant DiMille.
Then, on Nov. 8, she received an email from a Sweetery employee that left her "shaken and shell-shocked."
Amanda-
We have zero idea what type of warped sick games you are playing with us, but now it is time for us to have a say.
You are a despicable bottom feeding wretched disgrace of a person, who is as disgusting as they come.
How many times have we called you to follow up on the proposal that we expanded time and effort to produce based on your request and each and every time you cowardly hang up the phone on us when we identify who is calling, what an absolute low life twisted miserable individual you have to be.
That was just the start of a lengthy diatribe that went on to call De Pascale a "weak meager spineless empty sack low life piece of trash" and a "pile of dog sh—."
It concludes:
We truly hope that your wedding bombs and turns out to be a complete and total disaster of the century why would it be anything but since you are a part of it. We could not even imagine the person that would marry you, pity the poor lonely soul whose life is doomed before it starts with you, we hope that he or she runs and saves them self from the mud hole that you are.
If for some reason you need further clarification on our thoughts let us know we are certain we can clarify those thoughts for you.
"When I told [my fiancée] later and he goes 'are you freaking kidding me?'" De Pascale recalls. "I was and am still kinda in shock, but he was just furious. He printed out the emails right away."
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Then one of her friends posted screenshots of the email on Facebook (the post has since been made private) and tagged Sweetery, leading to a spate of "horrible hate-filled, aggressive messages containing vile language from those who have no involvement with this issue," said DiMille. On Tuesday, he posted a public apology to Sweetery's Facebook page in response to the negative comments.
He acknowledged to FoxNews.com that the expletive-ridden email came from his company, but says he had no part in its wording.
"Yes, it came from a company computer, but it was not sent by myself or any member of management," he told FoxNews.com on Tuesday. "It's a terrible offense, yes, but everyone makes mistakes."
DiMille said that his company had tentatively "penciled in the date" for De Pascale's wedding but, while waiting for her reply, received a request from another client for the same day.
"We always give our clients first right of refusal," said DiMille but acknowledged that no money exchanged hands and after the first email requesting a quote, never heard from De Pascale to pursue a contract. He originally refuted the bride-to-be's claim that multiple calls were made in a day but contended that some of his employees may have made repeated attempts after not getting through or being hung up on.
But with the email, DiMille said the comments were "made out of frustration" and he wasn't sure if the note itself warranted termination of the employee behind the message. When asked if the old adage about the "customer (even a potential one) always being right" holds true for his business, DeMille said, "I think clients bear some responsibility to be good clients. From my understanding, that did not happen in this situation and it's unfortunate that it escalated to this level."
But by Tuesday evening, the sweet truck company owner had changed his tune and told FoxNews.com that he decided to fire the employee behind the email. "I had a conversation with our associate who wrote to the client and told him that we had no choice but to let him go based on the pain that has been caused to Amanda."
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But De Pascale isn't convinced that the unnamed employee even wrote the email. She said she never received a written communication from anyone at Sweetery other than DiMille and a woman named Andrea. She also says DiMille left her at least one voicemail.
On Tuesday night, DiMille sent an apology directly to De Pascale asking for her understanding and forgiveness.
"It does deeply matter to us that you were offended by what was written to you," he wrote. "I know it will be difficult for you to believe this but our company's culture is not like what your experience has been, yet the experience that you encountered did happen.
"The 'whys' and the 'whats' don't matter as much as what was written to you out of apparent frustration by my, now former, associate. No one, whether it is a client or anyone, should be subjected to the type of message that you received."
The message ends with a plea for understanding that "people do make mistakes" and an offer to continue the conversation directly.
But the emotional damage is already done, De Pascale says.
"I could have reached out earlier and said maybe I'm not interested, but when you're planning a wedding you reach out to a lot of vendors, and there was absolutely no money exchanged," she said. "No other vendors had harassed me like this or belittled me, and I hope this never happens to another bride or customer ever again."
This article was originally published by Fox News on November 16, 2016.
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