No, I didn’t wait in the dark and cold, hoping to grab a door-buster special at 4 AM. Earlier this week we bought a new refrigerator. My defrost fix on our Frigidaire was temporary, because the coils iced over again. I’m a terrible fatalist about some things, and having never had success with refrigerator repairs in the past I didn’t want to bother seeing if it could be fixed. We’ve never liked the thing anyway, so I told Carol let’s just buy a new one. Delivery of a new Kenmore side-by-side, model 5102, is scheduled for today, and from a check of appliances at Best Buy it appears the manufacturer of this particular Kenmore is GE.
Today the same refrigerator is on sale for $60 less than what I paid. So, hoping there might be a price matching deal, and wanting to avoid driving to the mall on Black Friday, I pulled out my receipt and called the phone number for the store at the mall. Doing that put me through the usual voice system nightmare that we all know well. Several attempts to reach the appliance department ended up dumping me to a national call center, where I was asked if I had the store’s phone number. “Uh, yes, I did, and that was how I got you.” They were unable to give me a direct-dial number of the appliance department at the local store.
I went online and dug up a local, direct number for automotive. Close enough, because it worked. I said I was trying to reach the appliance department, and the gruff sounding but nice guy who answered the phoned transferred me.
Once I was speaking to a person on the floor where had I spent an hour or two a few days ago, she really was helpful. She looked up my order and said, “Yeah, it’s sixty dollars less, but we won’t include free delivery at that price, and that would be seventy dollars, so you’re doing better with the deal you have.” I went online to check, which was what I should have done to begin with, and, sure enough, delivery “starts at $70,” plus another ten bucks for hauling away the old one.
With all of the lip service that large retail corporations give to customer satisfaction, it’s hilarious and frustrating how often they intentionally fail to deliver it. Voice systems that dump customers to national call centers just get in the way. The good news is that when I reached the appliance department I was given a straight, quick explanation. So, once you get past the corporate nonsense, old-fashioned customer service still exists at Sears.
Follow-up: The old refrigerator, when it was working, held the freezer at -10F, the optimal temperature. When it broke the best it could do was +10F. The new refrigerator has been running for ten hours, and so far the best it can do in the freezer compartment is… +10F.
Follow follow-up: Whatta difference a day makes. I’ve never seen a refrigerator take so long to find its temperatures, but by setting the fridge one level warmer it’s now below 35F and the freezer is at -10F.
