As mentioned previously on this blog, these days, whenever someone inquires about Lancaster Arms on virtually any Internet gun forum, the answers that person receives are uniformly the same: "Stay away from Lancaster!"; "Crap quality, and crap customer service"; "I don't know how these clowns stay in business!"; "They've pissed off a LOT of people!"; "I ordered a Draco from them, was told upon ordering that I'd get it in three weeks, and I still haven't received it over a year later!" (By the way, as unbelievable as it sounds, that issue with the Draco is a 100% true story!)
And occasionally, someone will chime in and say something like, "Is Lancaster really that bad? Their rifles look nice." Or, "I bought a Lancaster three years ago, and it's been a great gun."
But when you look at the Better Business Bureau ("BBB") site for Arizona, and notice Lancaster Arms' "F" rating and the 28 complaints filed against this small company, you begin to realize that "something smells rotten in Denmark". (With my sincere apologies to Shakespeare for quoting him in this context.)
To put this in perspective, look at Century Arms; the largest seller (by far) of AK rifles in America, and a prime competitor of Lancaster. Because Century sells many, many more AK rifles than Lancaster, you might think their BBB rating would be questionable too, right? Wrong. Century Arms has had exactly one - that's right, one - complaint filed against them in the last three years. And even that complaint was "resolved" according to the BBB. So when Lancaster, a much smaller company than Century, comes along and earns 28 BBB complaints during that same time frame, well...you'd have to agree that something appears to be terribly, terribly wrong with Lancaster Arms.
Moreover, realize that filing a complaint with the BBB is often a "last resort" for disgruntled consumers. For every person who actually goes through the process of filing a BBB complaint against a business, there are probably at least 5 to 10 others who had a problem with the company, but didn't take it as far as filing a formal complaint with the BBB. In other words, it is very likely that the 28 filed complaints on Lancaster represents potentially hundreds of other people who have had problems with this company. No wonder seemingly nobody has anything good to say about Lancaster Arms.
Look, I realize that any company can mess-up, and have a disgruntled person or two file a complaint. Simply having one or two BBB complaints filed against you, doesn't necessarily mean anything is fundamentally wrong with your business. But I gotta tell ya...when 28 separate people feel like they have to file a formal complaint against you because you have wronged them, that pretty much proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the company in question is fundamentally untrustworthy, unreliable and stupendously incompetent. And that's putting it nicely! (And keep in mind, we're just talking about BBB complaints here. The Arizona Attorney General's Office has also been contacted about Lancaster Arms, and more than once I'm afraid.)
So, if you've been considering buying a Lancaster Arms firearm, or doing any business with them at all, you'd be well-served to think long and hard about whether that's really a good idea. With Lancaster, too many people have learned the hard way that it's never a good idea to do business with someone who has proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted! And don't think ,"Well, I'll purchase it through another dealer, and that way Lancaster won't feel like they can sit on my money for months on end like they have with so many retail customers." Wrong. Lancaster has been known to treat its dealers as poorly as it has treated its retail customers, which is precisely why some of Lancaster's dealers (or rather, "ex-dealers") are now refusing to carry Lancaster's products anymore.
All that said, if you are new to this blog...welcome. Read all of the 25 or so posts here from the last year and several months. If you do, you will understand why this blog exist, and why Lancaster Arms has completely, utterly destroyed its own reputation over the last 18 months. It's shocking that this company hasn't either gone bankrupt, or been sued out of existence yet. Yet...
