PediPaws — Not As Advertised

Mag­gie, our over­ly-sen­si­tive Airedale ter­ri­er, has some gnarly claws. I mean, she’s bread for dig­ging up larg­er rodents and snap­ping their necks, so one can hard­ly blame her. It’s just what she is. Her claws are those black, real­ly brit­tle type that are very tough to trim. The only way to do it that does­n’t leave her yelp­ing in dog­gy hys­ter­ics is with a high-speed rotary tool and a mini sand­ing drum. How­ev­er, even that can get nasty if she decides to strug­gle and ends up get­ting a sander to the knuck­le (yeah, fur does­n’t real­ly make that much less painful).

Which is exact­ly what is being sold as: a safe, easy way to file your pets claws. The prod­uct itself isn’t entire­ly use­less, though our dogs now fear it because it does make just enough noise to freak them out (Mag­gie also does­n’t care for my elec­tric tooth­brush, though). So even though it has­n’t worked too well for our pooches, I’m sure that some folks prob­a­bly swear by the thing.

My prob­lem is with Pedi­Paws — the com­pa­ny. When I bought this thing, we were told they were online or phone only. That is, “not avail­able in stores! Order Now!” How­ev­er, lit­er­al­ly the next day after order­ing I was in Bed, Bath, and Beyond and saw them at the check-out counter (“As seen on TV!”). I snapped a pho­to and sent it to Angela along with a cou­ple of choice swear words. I got home and called their cus­tomer ser­vice num­ber to can­cel the order. They told me that it had­n’t shown up yet and that I could­n’t can­cel; that I should call back in a cou­ple of days. Of course, when I call back the order has already gone through and shipped. I gave up and fig­ured it would­n’t be so bad…

Now, I keep get­ting checks that sure look an awful lot like rebate checks. Of course, there was nev­er any sort of rebate offered on these things. But, once you read a bit of fine print, it’s clear that this check has noth­ing to do with the Pedi­Paws prod­uct. It’s a con­tract that if you cash the check you agree to let them charge $140 a year for some cred­it mon­i­tor­ing crap on the card you bought the Pedi­Paws with.

Yikes!

So a com­pa­ny I already feel ques­tion­able about has my cred­it card and is try­ing some­what shady things to get me to autho­rize more charges on it; plus they want to get to review all my oth­er activ­i­ty (or, pos­si­bly worse, pass my card infor­ma­tion off to some third par­ty). This is not cool and I sin­cere­ly regret ever hav­ing bought this thing at all and espe­cial­ly from Pedi­Paws directly.

Some­one call Consumerist.