Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Buyer Beware Sears

Know how every time you buy a major appliance, the store from which you buy it tries to sell you an extended service contract? Well, do not waste your money on Sears. Our dryer, which is less than five years old, stopped working properly more than two weeks ago. We had an appointment to have it repaired today -- the first day we were able to get on their schedule -- and, since we had not heard from them all morning, assumed they would be coming in spite of the weather, considering that UPS, FedEx, Comcast, a local plumber and various other service vehicles have made it down our street. When we hadn't heard from them nearly two hours after the end of the appointment window, we called and were put on hold for 45 minutes, then told that they had canceled the appointment due to inclement weather and oops, they were going to inform us...by this evening. Moreover, they can't get us on the schedule for another week, until NEXT Wednesday.

I don't know about other people's families, but my family of 4 cannot go two weeks without a dryer unless I do laundry every single day and hang it around the house to dry -- working outside the house isn't possible and sitting on items we usually use for dining, exercise, etc. isn't possible either. The nearest laundromats are a town over -- that's assuming I was willing either to pay money to wash AND dry items there or to bring wet laundry in a basket to be dried there. Keep in mind that we paid for our dryer at Sears with the expectation of service, thinking it would never be necessary to pay someone else for our laundry. Which means that we are going to have to call a private repair company and pay them to repair our dryer -- this on top of what we've already paid for Sears' worthless extended service contract.

Does anyone know whether it is possible to file a report with the Better Business Bureau or someone like that? It's outrageous that Sears is selling "service contracts" and then refusing to provide service -- it's stealing from customers.

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