Brian M.

I've always thought of L. L. Bean as being an excellent manufacturer of clothing. Yes, their prices are more expensive than other mainstream manufacturers, but I've never really minded those extra costs because they are purported to have one of the best warranties in their industry. In fact, they used to offer a lifetime warranty but had to stop it a few years ago after apparent abuses – but, to me, that didn't matter very much because they still offer a 1-year return on their clothing and will even consider older clothing for returns due to defective materials or craftsmanship. Because of this, I've always had a certain peace-of-mind about paying the extra costs that L. L. Bean demands.

However, after trying to replace a pair of jeans after 22 months, I realized their "guarantees" aren't as solid as they seem to want you to believe.

In January 2020, I purchased 3 pair of jeans under Item #: TC******* in 3 different colors for $49.95 each. One of them (the Faded Denim) has started to wear quite badly in the corners of both back pockets. In fact, on one of the pockets, you can see straight through the material. In November 2021, I sent the jeans, along with my original receipt and pictures to their RMA department for consideration for replacement and was told that my warranty claim was denied because, in their opinion, the jeans had worn from normal wear-and-tear. I explained that I only wear jeans occasionally, I only wear them for causal use (not for work), and I have several other L. L. Bean jeans which have not suffered the same issue. Unfortunately, none of it mattered and she reiterated, to her, it looks like normal wear-and-tear.

I live in south Texas - we only wear jeans a handful of weeks throughout the year. Even then, I only wear my nice jeans (L. L. Bean) for holiday gatherings, family outings, or other events where I know they're not going to be destroyed. My other L. L. Bean jeans, (which are in great condition) are evident of that. It seems clear that these were just a defective pair, but they wanted to stick to their conclusion.

Over the past 5 years, I've spent $3,943 on L. L. Bean clothing and, up until now, I've been very happy with their quality. I wasn't even worried about these defective jeans because I know bad manufacturing happens sometimes and I'd never had any faulty clothing from them before.

To me, L. L. Bean has painted a picture that they weren't really concerned about the customer service, so, to that end, I have returned my most recent order of $224 (which they did refund) and when my family and friends ask where I get my nice clothes from, I will be answering with a different manufacturer and will dissuade them from considering L. L. Bean. Yes, their clothes do look nice, but their costs are simply too high to chance on a product that might fail after less than 50 uses.

If you can find some friends and a half-way decent room, then you could be content for a while. Those places, however, are few-and-far-between.

Paltalk loves to advertise that they have over 100,000 people online at any given time, but you will only ever see a small fraction in your own language. Even then, the rooms are plagued with people coming online just to masturbate on cam, play pornographic videos, or harass foreigners. I supposed they can't be blamed for other people's actions but considering how trivially easy it is to sign up for an account, it makes me wonder if they allow this behavior just to keep their numbers up. Read the other reviews of people's experience and you'll begin to see a trend.

Be very careful if you plan on spending any money with Paltalk as you will find them to be very money hungry and quite nefarious in their methods for getting it from you. Once you spend your money, you might as well consider it gone and try to get as much use out of it as you can because they love to tout "all sales are final" when you realize you've been duped. Also, Paltalk is headquartered in Istanbul so your options are very limited if you want to try and recover your hard-earned cash.

Virtual gifts and virtual credits are temporary and they don't tell you that until AFTER you've bought them! So, if you spend $150 to buy 5,000 credits, you only have 30 days to use them before they take them from you. Even if you do use them, say on virtual gifts to give people, those gifts are also temporary and will expire leaving you with absolutely nothing for your investment. Also, when you're purchasing your credits, you have to manually OPT-OUT from them automatically renewing your purchase after you've used them up or they've expired.

Their credits are massively inflated. 5,000 credits at $150 means you spent around $0.33 per credit. Now, to gift someone an Extreme subscription' for ONE MONTH, you would have to use 3,042 credits (roughly $92) whereas buying (in cash) someone the same subscription for an ENTIRE YEAR, would only cost you $59.95. You would have spent 53% more for a drastically shorter subscription than you would have just by paying with cash.

One more note on purchasing, if you buy anything (credits, colored nicks, rooms, etc), and then the next day they decide to run a sale, you're locked into your original purchase with the familiar "all sales are final" response. They will not refund you the difference, and they will not add your purchase to the sale. You are stuck with what you got.

Be careful with the rooms you're visiting. There are a small handful of fairly decent rooms, but this place is ripe with people who are only online just to insult you. Given that, and the fact that the majority of the rooms are nothing but music rooms, it can take you quite a long time to find somewhere worth your while.

If you do decide to try out Paltalk, I wish you the best of luck and hope you find somewhere good to settle into. However, be careful with what you talk about as the veterans may warn that Paltalk is rumored to ban people (with no refund) for talking about other chat platforms.