Prime Masonry Materials

These guys are top notch! Had the outside of our house rocked last year. And this year we’re doing the fireplaces. This is where we buy all of the materials! Customer service is fabulous! I highly recommend them!

I am so glad to have discovered Prime a few years ago. Very friendly and helpful staff. Prices are comparable to the big box stores but their customer service far exceeds theirs. I love that they will load all your materials too. For all your big or small projects, Prime has everything you’ll need.

Acted like gentlemen when buying, like jerks when trying to return.
Purchased 500# of ‘flagstone.’ My wife wanted the mixture of colors this product has, very much including black. We chose the material, with input from the salesman, and they put it on a pallet and went off somewhere to weigh it. I have no idea if it was accurately weighed, or whether they accounted for the weight of the pallet, but we paid our money, and went home.
There turned out to be a lot of tan-​colored dirt on all sides of the stone, which was easily washed off with a hose and a brush. BUT —
As the dirt came off, so did the black. We were now looking at a load of material VERY different than what we chose, and what black was left was sloughing off. I don’t want to have to scrape the entire surface, and our mason simply said it was «crap.» He said it was basically what happens to lesser-​quality stone when it weathers over a long period of time. What it did was change the color of what we purchased!
I loaded it back into our truck, and went back to Prime (Oxnard). I was left standing for quite a while as two customers ahead of me were tended to — at one point the back-​office lady (very friendly and helpful) asked the one man working if she should send somebody up to help — but the man behind the counter said, «no!»
When I was finally face to face, he asked what I wanted — I told him I wanted to return the bad material. He asked me to repeat — as in — «WHAT?» so I repeated.
«We don’t return stone.» and he walked away.
I left.
My wife called the store to ask if she could talk to somebody else, but ended up talking to the counter guy I had spoken to. Nope — they would not help us. Nor would they exchange for other material they had on hand. She offered to send helpers to do all the unloading for them — nope.
She kept asking to speak to somebody in charge, and finally she got a call from the manager, and he said it was entirely «up to him.» Don’t know what that meant, but apparently it meant «no.»
After the wife got angry and told him what jerks they were being and what poor customer service they were offering, I don’t know why, but he finally said we could bring the material back, but he would charge us
25% to do so. 25%!!
I will never set foot on this place again (barring a possible return with less than 25% extortion fee). I will take my business elsewhere. We are house flippers, so we use a lot of stacked stone and other stone products. We have been buying elsewhere, and we will return to doing so. They are NOT going to see any of that business.
Our masonry contractor said he stopped buying there a long time ago for much the same reasons, and a few others.