Oh, Sears. Why don’t you understand that the point of commerce is to sell merchandise to your customers? Chad tells Consumerist ordered a set of appliances for his new home from Sears, with a delivery time 8 days in the future. Three hours before his delivery window, Sears called to let Chad know–oh, yeah, the stove that he ordered was discontinued.

We purchased our first home on 12/29/2010. It was a foreclosure, and no longer had a fridge or stove.

After taking a week or so to move most of our things in we started shopping around for the needed appliances and eventually picked a set that was on sale on sears.com
Delivery time turned out to be 8 days, but we decided with the cold weather to keep our food good and the combo microwave/oven/grill we had we could make do that long.

Two days later my phone rang from a computerized system that asked me to push some buttons and confirm the date and items that I had ordered. It also told me I’d get a second confirmation call the day before delivery with a 2 hour delivery window.

The night before my delivery I get another computerized phone call that confirms my items were scheduled to be delivered the next day between 11 and 1. A little after 8 the next morning the day of delivery I’m packing a few more things into the car at our old apartment and get another call from sears, this time from a real person. The stove we had ordered was sold out. When they attempted a re-order to get a new delivery date, it told them the item was discontinued. I was then given a number for sears.com to pick a new stove.

I text-ed my wife the info so she could call as I was busy packing. She texted back a while later and said when she called the number and told them what was going on the phone rep taking her call told her “Oh, well we don’t do that here.” No offer of exchange, upgrade, or replacement of our order.

We called back about 10 minutes later and had them cancel everything. We also complained that they would confirm first an order, then a date, then the time before bothering to check if they even had the product. If they had told us a few days in advance it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but 3 hours? As my wife said later that evening, “Here we have a whole house to furnish/decorate/renovate, and sears just lost a customer, permanently.”

We ended up taking a shopping trip out to best buy and getting a much nicer set, with no interest financing, a 2 day delivery time, a 100$ gift card for buying a big item, and 250$ off for buying a display model stove.

Oh, and they checked immediately and told us the items were in stock too!

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Sears Still Has Customers, Can’t Manage To Sell Them Actual Merchandise

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