AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) — Meet James Shirey. He and his fiancé, Kaylee, started planning their wedding in April and enlisted Al’s Formal Wear for tuxes for the groom and groomsmen.

He told MyHighPlains.com the experience was great at first, but since Al’s Formal Wear closed suddenly last week, “it’s turned into a nightmare.”

Shirey said they received a voicemail informing them of the shutdown and were given a corporate phone number, but to no avail.

“My fiancé’s has been calling, you know, every hour on the hour, you know, every half hour, can’t get nobody through,” said Shirey, who said he’s paying for the wedding in cash. “We’ve gone to the tux manager website that they give us to pay for tuxes. And now it’s saying it’s temporarily not usable.”

The cost?

Shirey told KAMR that he’s paid $1,200 in cash for tuxes, with no idea if he’ll get any of it back.

The wedding is slated for Sept. 23, 2023, and they’re expecting between 100 to 150 people.

Those plans are now altered, or, like their honeymoon, canceled altogether.

“Me and the groomsmen now have to go, we’re gonna go boots and jeans instead of the suits that we already paid for, which is gonna cost us more money. We no longer have the option of catering, and that’s the hard part. Because now we’re going to have to cook the food ourselves and all that just to hopefully get something for all of our guests,” he explained.

Shirey said the part that hurts the most, all the time, money, and hard work he’s put into the wedding went down the drain.

“When I’m having to work 16 hours a day, six days a week to pay for this wedding. It’s become frustrating because all that time that I’ve spent away from my son and my daughter and my fiancé is now wasted for no reason,” he noted.

MyHighPlains.com spoke with one former employee of the Al’s Formal Wear store in Amarillo last week, and she said she sympathizes with the customers.

“I got sick at my stomach,” said Dee Wakefield, who worked for Al’s for about two years. “What about our customers? What are they going to do? We’re just so very, very sorry.”

We spoke with the Better Business Bureau Amarillo branch about options you may have if you’ve been affected by the Al’s Formal Wear shutdown.

The BBB said if you’ve paid with a credit or debit card, the quickest way to get your money back is to dispute it with your financial institution.

They told us that filing a complaint with the BBB is a good option as well.