What’s wrong with Sears?

The investor buzz on Sears is that it has more of a future as a real estate business, leasing its store space to others, than as a retailer. My recent experience supports the idea that the company isn’t much interested in selling stuff to consumers.

The day before our new washer and dryer were to arrive, I still hadn’t received an email from Sears confirming the delivery. Online, my order was still listed with the word “processing.”

Huh. So I called the customer service line to ask what was going on. After a loooong wait on hold, a rep said he would investigate. There was a second looooong wait on hold. He came back to say the order had been cancelled.

Say what? Why?

He said he would investigate, and then we were disconnected.

I called back, endured another long wait, only to have another phone rep tell me the same thing. She didn’t disconnect me, but she also couldn’t answer why my order had been cancelled or why I wasn’t notified.

So I sent an email to customer service, and eventually got this back:

While our inventory is updated periodically, it is not in a real-time inventory environment. As our website serves customers throughout the entire country, it is typical that several customers will have the same item in their cart. Inventory is again verified after the order is submitted. It can happen that more orders are submitted than we can complete.

Again, no guidance about which item was out of stock (was it the washer? The dryer? The hose? The plug?) or why I wasn’t notified prior to my calls that my order had been cancelled.

The email did encourage me to “please place a new order for the same [sic] after some time or order a similar item at Sears.com.”

Oh, yeah, sure. I’m a lab rat that can be conditioned by intermittent reinforcement. I’ll keep placing my order and hope that sooner or later I get what I paid for…or “a similar item.”

Ordering from Sears.com was a pain to begin with. For one thing, the site automatically includes Sears’ wildly overpriced extended warranty, which equals about a third of the cost of the appliance. After you opt out of that, you have to enter delivery information separately for each appliance—because so many people have their dryers delivered to a different place than their washers, I guess. Sears also wants you to pay extra if you want a four-hour delivery window instead of an all-day wait.

I was trying to be loyal to the Kenmore brand, because the washer and dryer we’re replacing performed well for 13 years. So much for that. Lowes had a nice set for a better price, fortunately, and its free delivery came with a two-hour window.

My new washer and dryer are working great—so this story has a happy ending. I wonder if the same will be true for Sears.