Final Sears Update (Hopefully)

Finally, after months of phone calls, hang-ups and online rants via the Sears Facebook page, those SOB's have finally fixed my snow blower. Am I happy? Hardly.

For starters it took so much effort to get them to just send someone out to fix it. Realistically it should have taken 1 phone call. However, it took much more than just 1 phone call, it took dozens of phone calls. Dozens of, "I'm sorry, but..." and, "I understand your frustration, but...".

No Sears, you failed. You didn't understand my frustration and you still don't.

I spent a lot of money on that snow blower and honestly, it shouldn't have been so hard to get a tech out to fix it. Not to mention that the first time he came out it was basically to just scratch his head and tell me it's broken and that they should have replaced it. I got that, thanks, but Sears is run by a bunch of a-holes that won't replace anything. So then he ordered parts because apparently aside from duct tape, they don't carry much on those repair vans.

The parts were delivered to my door via UPS. The only thing I liked about that was that if the tech couldn't come back out I could have installed them myself.

Then the tech came during a snow storm that dropped 17 inches of snow. I must say that the other 99% of Sears employees probably would have just cancelled, so Mike, thank you.

After all the parts were installed the snow blower sounded horrible, but at least it ran. That's a start I guess. Unfortunately, I can almost see it dying in my shed over the summer. It really sounded bad, like it wanted to die. It really did and several times it almost DID stop working while we were battling the never-ending 2-day snow storm.

My plan is to buy a new snow blower from another company this fall and sell the Sears one on Craigslist. It's too nerve wracking to think that it could just die at any moment when I need it the most. I've had some bad times with that snow blower and I'm ready to break up with it.

No more Craftsman piece of junk snow blower. No more Sears. No more horrible customer service that makes everyone that works at Bank of America look like a ray of sunshine on a warm spring day shining down on an adorable newborn puppy.

Seriously, that's how bad Sears is. I hate the company. Their products suck and I can't wait until they go out of business, which they will for the reasons listed previously.

Bye bye Sears. Crawl back into the cesspool you came out of.

Sears Update 2

It's about time I posted an update in regards to my Sears snow blower drama.

Unfortunately, not much has happened. Dear old Jay in the executive office still doesn't have a working phone. It must be a Craftsman. He is getting much more creative at the times that he is calling though - Sunday during church hours was my favorite. He keeps leaving cryptic little messages saying that he will, "call back tomorrow". I can only assume he lives on a planet much larger than Earth so that a single day-long rotation takes more than the 24 hours it takes on our planet as he never calls back "the next day".

Perhaps the galactic distance between the Sears Executive Office and planet Earth is part of the reason why I can't call him back directly? That could also explain why we are worlds apart on this issue of my snow blower. Hmm...

No, in reality I think "Jay" is just another lazy good for nothing Sears employee trained to sell products, but not back them up when they inevitably fail. He calls when he is certain that I won't answer the phone and if he miscalculates and I do pick up, he immediately hangs up.

Perhaps the time has come for a class-action lawsuit. A glance at their Facebook page shows that there are many other people out there just like myself that have bought a bad snow blower and have not been helped or had their machine fixed according to the terms of the warranty. I think it would be cheaper, easier and less damaging to their reputation to just repair the bad machines and change their design for future productions, but hey -- if they don't want to use common sense, that's their business.

EDITED AT 4:29pm

I just got off the phone with a woman named Tricia. She was able to arrange for a tech to come to my house to fix the snow blower a week after tomorrow. It will be covered under warranty. I am sad that it has taken so long, but at the same time I really appreciate Tricia's no non-sense approach. She didn't overdo it with the fake apologies and she was fast and courteous.

As a bonus, she gave me Jay's phone number and extension. You know - to the "broken" phone. I'll be calling that one later to see if he answers. Lets hope it's really broken since I still have the voicemail from this past Sunday where he claims that it is.  The odd number that appears on my phone's screen is his extension, so I can see that he's calling from the supposedly broken phone line. Awesome.

Final tally - Score 1 for Tricia; 0 for Jay.

Pay attention Sears -- more people like Tricia and less like Jay. Got it? 
 

Sears Update

Since my last post...

Since my last post I have e-mailed Sears and visited their Facebook page to leave a nice (haha) comment. The comment generated a lot of chatter on the web with many other people jumping in to say that it isn't right and that their snowblowers are junk.

What Sears has done...

Sears reached out via Facebook to tell me to email them with my contact information. So I did. I have yet to get an email back, but yesterday I got a kind of shifty phone call from someone responding to one of my contacts. They said their name is Jay and they are with the executive office. They also said that their direct line wasn't working currently so they would call back.  (Sound suspicious? I thought so too... perhaps the phone is made by Sears? Ba-dum-ching.)

"Jay" says he will call back today... so I'm waiting. I guess I'll have to answer every call that comes in just in case it's him. I bet I'll have to wait until he's done cleaning the toilets because there's no shot that anyone higher up than a custodian called me. That's just not how that company rolls.

Where I'm at right now...

If they fail to call as they are supposed to, I am going to turn them into the Better Business Bureau. This isn't just about me anymore. Their Facebook website has been really helpful in exposing just how many people have bought faulty equipment from them. They need to issue a recall. It's that simple. Their products are faulty and for something so pricey, it needs to work as advertised. If a car company issued a vehicle and 5% of the outgoing cars turned up with the same problem - no matter how big or how small - there would be a recall. I believe the percentage of people experiencing a problem with the Sears product is much higher.

So with that I say -- SEARS - Open your eyes. Issue a recall. At this point, it's the only thing that can save you from the public. Keep doing business as you are and in 5 or 10 years, Sears will no longer exist.

Update as of 12:39pm:
I received a call on my phone from the same "number" that was Sears yesterday. It shows up as 11249 by the way. Weird, I know. Anyway, they called and I answered because I know it's Sears and they HUNG UP ON ME as soon as I picked up. My phone displays when the call gets dropped or lost so it's pretty clear that they HUNG UP.  Also, they didn't call back and I don't have a number to call them with. A little too convenient if you ask me.

 
     

DO NOT SHOP AT SEARS

******!!!Warning!!!****** 

Before you make a large purchase from Sears, you NEED to read this warning. Sears sold me a defective snow blower and they will sell one to you too. Furthermore, their "customer service" team is a nightmare. I have spent the last two days on the phone trying to straighten out this nightmare of a situation.

At the end of October 2012 I purchased a brand new snow blower from Sears. I had it delivered and there was a problem with the delivery, so it had to be pushed back. I got my machine in November. The first plowable snowfall happened this past Friday. It was blizzard Nemo, and it dumped about 3 feet of snow on my house.

It shouldn't have been a problem, since I had my brand new $600 snow blower. It is a 24 inche, dual-stage snow blowing beast. I should have been able to get my wimpy 6 car (smart cars) driveway clear in no time. 

Lies. I put some freshly purchased gas into the snowblower, which was already set up with oil and ready to go and attempted to turn it on. Fail. Tried the electric start. Louder fail. Took out the spark plug... it looked fine. I had no idea what was wrong with my snow blower.

As I sat trapped in my house with two young children I called Sears. After an hour on hold, I finally got to talk to a real person. I told her my brand new machine was broken. She gleefully informed me that my return period had passed as did my exchange period and all that I could do was bring it in for repair. The repair would be covered under warranty. Just toss it in your car and bring it on in she said.  Um... did I mention that there was 3 feet of snow in my driveway because I couldn't clear it with my snow blower? How pray tell should I "bring it on in"? **Transfer to technical support**

The nice Indian woman on the other end of the line asked me to hold my phone up to the snow blower while I tried to start it. Awesome, she is some type of snow blower whisperer. Fail. Her attempt to whisper sweet nothings at my machine and coax it into working didn't work. She told me it was the carbeurator -- they go all the time she said.

Your carbeurator should not need repairing the first time you use a machine. That's a good indicator that something isn't right to begin with. Just throw it in the car and come on in. I explained to her that unlike rain, you can't just drive through snow. I'm stuck.

Numerous calls and chats later, I got the same answers. We wound up very slowly shoveling ourselves out. I called to speak with these snow blower repair gurus at my local Sears to confirm they can fix my machine. I called. I held. I was hung up on. I called again. I held and I finally got a hold of someone. The young man on the other end of the line seemed confused. No, we don't do repairs. None of the Sears do. Why would they tell you that?  Why indeed.    

It turns out that I can push/pull/drag/drive my snow blower in to my local Sears and they will ship it out for repair. Depending on what's wrong it may or may not be covered under warranty. Since it never worked, I would assume it would be covered, but who the heck knows what those delivery guys did with it before it got to me.

So now, as I watch my local weather man orgasm over the prospect of another snow storm, I have to find a way to get my snow blower - which is now full of gas BTW - into my car (hahahahahahahahahaha) and get it to a Sears to be shipped out for God only knows how long. After they get it back, I get to repeat the process to get it home, once I pay any fees for the repair of my BRAND NEW snow blower that didn't ever work to begin with.

No returns. No exchanges. Apparently we chanted, "black black no trade back" when I bought it. Who knew? Not me. But now you do.

So with that I say, avoid Sears. Ever since they did the nasty with K-Mart they have been going down hill. Their products are shifty at best and their customer service team apparently consists of the people who were fired from Bank of America for being bad at their jobs. That's right, Sears customer service is worse than Bank of America.

Just in case that wasn't strong enough - AVOID SEARS. DO NOT SHOP THERE. They are thieves. They are liars. They are cheats. They are unethical baby stealing puppy killers on their way to an anti-woman, anti-christian rally with their closest relatives that they go to the Westboro Baptist cult with. That's how horrible this company is.