Planning for a wedding should be a happy and exciting time. Unfortunately for bride-to-be Amanda De Pascale, she experienced quite the opposite when she claims a dessert food truck company hurled insult after insult at her just because she turned down their quote.
De Pascale had her eye out for Sweetery NYC, which distributes specialised desserts during weddings. "My fiancé 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 Fox News. "They were really going to be our wedding favours."
She asked for a price quote from the company through its email address. When Sweetery NYC replied with a $2,900 figure, De Pascale decided its services were out of her price range. She was disappointed but did not think much of it.
However, the story did not end there. She says Sweetery NYC repeatedly called her about her wedding.
"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." De Pascale was referring to Sweetery NYC co-founder and owner Grant DiMille.
On Nov. 8, De Pascale says she received an email from a Sweetery employee that left her "shaken and shell-shocked," according to Fox.
The letter reportedly read: "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 expended 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," the letter continued.
The Sweetery NYC employee reportedly called De Pascale a "weak meager spineless empty sack low life piece of trash" and a "pile of dog sh—."
Instead of happy well-wishes for her wedding, the employee gave her a foreboding greeting. "We truly hope that your wedding bombs and turns out to be a complete and total disaster of the century. [W]hy 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."
De Pascale showed the letter to her fiancé, and he was flabbergasted by the company employee's rudeness. He printed several copies of the letter and shared it with their friends. One friend even posted screenshots of it on Facebook, tagged Sweetery.
It started a spate of "horrible hate-filled, aggressive messages containing vile language from those who have no involvement with this issue," according to DiMille.
DiMille issued a public apology on Sweetery's Facebook page on Tuesday, saying he had no part in the wording of the email. "Yes, it came from a company computer, but it was not sent by myself or any member of management," he said. "It's a terrible offense, yes, but everyone makes mistakes."
At first, DiMille refused to fire the staff who composed the email. He even suggested that De Pascale wasn't as innocent as she claimed to be. 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."
In the end, DeMille changed his tune by Tuesday evening and decided to fire the employee who wrote the scathing letter. "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," he said.
He even wrote a letter of apology to Amanda. "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," he added.
For her part, De Pascale said no bride deserves to be insulted the way she had been by Sweetery NYC. "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."
