A semi-daily chronicle of my life as a musician, a family man, and a citizen of Oregon.

Sep 3, 2011

Sears Sucks

We’re running out of places to buy appliances.  Seems like given the profit margin on white goods we’d have a better chance.  Here’s the letter we just sent to Sears.

Dear Sears,

My husband and I have purchased several items from your store in the past few years we have been home owners. We have purchased a  dyson vacuum, two dryers, and one washer. We have done most of our shopping in the Lyod Center store near our home. However our recent experience trying to shop online was terrible. I would like you to know that you will never  have our business again.  We are both very busy professionals and  have been researching products for our recent kitchen upgrade.  We did our research and decided to shop on line to purchase two items for our kitchen a fridge and a stove.  After much online research and reviewing different products we decided that a Kenmore and whirlpool would be best and we could order them online from your company in order to save on time.  Within an hour after placing our online order, we were called by a customer service representative. I hope you listen to the call, she was incredibly rude and definitely would benefit from some communication training, something in the past I would have believed your company  would value. Today you lost not only our future business but our referrals to friends and family.  I will share this negative experience with everyone I know who may be purchasing such products for their home. My husband was questioned about the one line purchase by your customer service representative and when he indicated that we had bought several purchases from your company in the past, they questioned how they were to know it was us who had actually purchased them. Furthermore, they ran the transaction through as pending and demanded that we run down the store and show our identification to the store along with our visa card. Nothing of this sort was indicated on the web page discussing online ordering and pick up. Since we have been frequent customers within your company we assumed that you kept a record of these purchases. In the future you need to have  disclaimer that when your customers want to order online they will treated like security risks as well as be dealing with rude inconsiderate customer service and management staff, as we did ask to talk to a manager that experience was exactly the same. In addition, one would assume that your business process in these situations would include the verification step *before* you charge our credit card, not after.  When we shared this with your customer service representative she completely ignored the feedback, saying that Sears was not my financial institution.  I understand that, thank god, Sears is not my financial institution.  One would assume, however, that you could control when you charge us, although apparently this is not the case.  We have no problem showing our ID when we pick our items up, but they demanded that we go down there now today, our very reason for trying to do this type of business on line. Thank you very much for wasting our time.  You will not be receiving our business as customers again.