Sears Rant

[aishabintjamil]

I am so annoyed tonight words fail me. I am never going to buy a large item from Sears again.

A week ago I ordered a new, larger snowblower. It arrived Wednesday. I got to picking it up Friday evening. I uncrated i, and fed it oil and gas yesterday in preparation for the big storm today. I went out this afternoon to clear the foot of snow that's been dumped in our driveway. I pull out the instructions for starting it. Step number one is putting in the ignition key. I look around. I have a little bag of cotter pins and some mysterious metal bits that look a bit like bolts, except they have no threads. Nothing that looks like a key. Back to the manual. Maybe it doesn't actually look like a key? No, there's a picture. It definitely should look like a key.

It's not there.

The machine won't start without it.

I go back inside to call Sears. I spend 15 minutes wading through voice mail hell and commercial filled hold, while being assured my call is important to them. Finally I find myself talking to someone who wouldn't pass a Turing test. She was so incapable of deviating from her script, or realizing that she had an extremely angry live human on the phone that I'd suspect her of being an artificial intelligence, except I don't think they'd make one that spoke English with such a thick foreign accent. Finally she determined that since I was missing a part, I needed to talk to the parts department. She'd be happy to give me their number. Not transfer me directly, or anything helpful like that. Just give me a different number to call.

So I hang up and call the parts number. Then spend another 15 minutes on hold (Yes, but this time I was timing it). Eventually I get the parts department. They expect me to me to know the part number. Eventually I do find it in the owners manual. Now, the kicker - they'll be happy to send it out to me. I should have it on the 21st. The person on the phone doesn't seem to understand why I'm not happy with that. Do I need it now?

After I have informed her that I had a foot of fresh snow in my driveway, she suggested that I could get it faster by going over ***MYSELF**** to the parts depot in Manchester and picking it up.

I know they can't get it to me instantly in the middle of a significant snowstorm, but I think a customer who has a $500+ item which doesn't work right out of the box because they screwed up and left out a vital part deserves a little more of an attempt to make things right. Offer to Fedex me the part for delivery tomorrow. Or offer to send someone over to drop it off. After all, I've been inconvenienced by their incompetence already. I'd at least like an apology, and an effort to make up for it.

So, since I didn't get any of that, or even find someone who cared that they had an angry customer, I'm venting here in the hopes that I'll help someone else avoid the same headaches. If you're buying a major appliance, don't go to Sears.

Comments

[vg-ford.livejournal.com]

Suck. :( Did you supe up? I would have, after that. They should definitely have overnighted that to you.

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

No, at that point it was going up to 4pm, and I wanted to use what daylight was left to go out and clear enough of the driveway to get out before the freezing rain started. This is the kind of storm I wanted the new one for, because the little electric really isn't up to it, but we got enough cleared that we should be able to get out tomorrow.

I'll still have the part faster by picking it up myself tomorrow, so I might have decided against the Fedex option anyway, but it pisses me off that they didn't offer.