Sears

I REALLY DID SEND THIS LETTER TO SEARS.  I REALLY AM NOT ANGRY AT SEARS. THE WRITING REALLY DID DEFLATE THE CONSIDERABLE ANGER I FELT BEFORE DOING THE WRITING.


Hello, there . . . 

In 1979 I purchased a Diehard battery - Sears' Finest!  Around 1979, anyway - I'm getting old and I have trouble remembering my dates.  1979 is pretty close.  It's in the ballpark.  Nobody can say: "1979!  Get the hell out of here!"

Over the course of the next year it failed twice.  Sears stood by its warranty and replaced the battery twice - but did not reimburse me for getting my car jumped, and each replacement battery was prorated, of course, so I had to ante up twice more.   Piqued, I sent a letter detailing my grievance to Sear's Customer Service where it vanished into a great Dome of Silence.

"I will never shop at Sears again," quoth I.

Until June 4, 2014, a day that will live in infamy.  I purchased a bistro patio set and two side chairs at the Pacific View Mall which is nowhere near the Pacific Ocean.  Just to be clear - I realize this is not your fault and I hold you in no way accountable.  The kid that helped me was great.  I returned a few days later and picked up my purchase.  My wife and I - well, my wife mostly - tried to put the bistro table together but were unsuccessful, mainly due to some comically mis-drilled bolt holes.  There was no way that table was going to stand up on its own. Those bolt holes were messed up.

We loaded the entire, partially assembled, completely unpackaged bistro set back into our car and returned it to the store.  The guy at Customer Pick-up was great.  We were directed back to the patio section for the financial part where a very nice young man credited our account and reordered a replacement set.  His manager drifted in and out, swiping his manager's card glumly, with a look of glummy boredom on his glum face.   It would have really, really been nice if he had acknowledged our plight and tried to make it better.

How about:  "We're very sorry for the problem here - could we offer you free delivery and set-up?"  Something, anything.  Look at me and smile - that would have been a big improvement.

A few days later we were notified that our replacement set had arrived.  Back we went to pick up Set Number Two which had a slightly different set of comically mis-drilled holes, a fact we discovered upon returning home.  We did manage to get the table together but the four legs were not striking the same surface at the same time, a very important part of the table function. We had wised up a little and put the table together first - leaving all the other parts in the carton - so it was a lot easier to load up our car and return all of the crap to Sears.  If we were really wise we would have put the table together in the fucking parking lot instead of driving it all the way home again.  At this point we also returned the side chairs - we had no faith in the products that Sears was selling.  We had developed a terrific allergy to Sears' products.

The same guy at Customer Pick-up was great again, maybe even a little sheepish - he really seemed to be on our side, unlike store management.  Again, we had to go upstairs for the financial part.  A somewhat less nice young man had all kinds of problems this time.  First, the bistro part had been coded somewhere, by someone, in some dark hole, as a cash return even though we had paid with a credit card.  The somewhat less nice man couldn't refund our credit card because of this mis-coding and he didn't have enough money in his cash drawer so he had to call someone somewhere who didn't seem to want to stop by.

So we waited.

Fortunately, during the wait we could also attend to the return of the two side chairs.  Since this was the first return for this particular item we foresaw sunny skies and smooth sailing.  Funny, that - the return came up as a Sears' gift card, which you might imagine we had absolutely no interest in touching with the ten-foot pole you probably sell in your tool department.  I have to tell you that if I had needed a ten-foot pole at that point I wouldn't have bought one at your store even though I had taken the trouble to drive back and forth and back and forth until I was frankly getting a little dizzy.  The increasingly less nice young man couldn't process this and had to alert a manager who seemed to have about as much interest in stopping by as the people with my $270, who had not yet arrived.

We waited some more.  

During the wait the slightly nicer young man - he seemed to be rallying!  Maybe he saw the end in sight! - let us know that they had to go through all kinds of drillings and hammerings to get the display bistro sets cobbled together in the store.  This was not information that we could find in any of Sears' promotional material nor was it passed on to us word-of-mouth, off-the-record, before we bought the first of our two identical bistro sets.  It wasn't the kind of information we enjoyed hearing, particularly.  We might have reconsidered our purchase decision had this information seen the light of day.

Both the money lady and the manager showed up simultaneously which made us suspect some shadowy collusion.

"How ya doin'?" the manager said.  He was much less glum than the first manager but also expressed approximately zero interest in our plight.  Again, we would have kept everything if someone had offered free deliver and set-up.

So we got our money back.  So we lost a day of our time what with all of the driving back and forth and back and forth and cursing and fumbling with tools to put together some shoddy merchandise.

I assume that you understand that it will be about another 35 years before I shop at Sears?  At which point I will be about 95 years old and probably not the demographic that you will be most interested in attracting.

Sorry for the length of the letter - I'm posting it on my blog site and wanted to provide as much detail as possible for my readers.

With much sincerity and no hard feelings but with a lot of anti-Sears intransigence.

Fondly.
Little Stevie Seaweed