Kristi’s garage door opener is from Sears’ venerable Craftsman brand. When the chain assembly broke, logically she contacted Sears to come fix it for her. The repair-scheduling website was slick and easy to use, perhaps lulling her into a false sense that she was in for a professional and logical commercial transaction. Then, it was time for the garage door repair person to actually show up.

She writes.

When the chain assembly on my Craftsman brand garage door opener broke recently, I figured the best course of action would be to go right to the source — Sears — and let their home repair experts come fix it.

The Sears website is slick and one of the better sites I’ve seen for scheduling home repair visits. I selected the option to repair a garage door opener, picked a time (arrival sometime between 1pm to 5pm) and got both a confirmation email and a follow-up confirmation call the next day. Easy peasy, I was feeling good!

Fast forward to today: Repair Day. The repair dude doesn’t show by 5pm (annoying, but I’ve come to expect this result as a possibility no matter what company I’m dealing with), so I call to find out what’s going on. Hey, it’s the Washington DC area, there’s lots of traffic, the guy might be running late. No biggie.

I am told by the customer service rep that, in fact, Sears cancelled my appointment on its own… sometime *after* their robo-dialer called up to confirm my appointment.

Of course, nobody from Sears bothered to call me to tell me that my appointment had been cancelled, which was why I ended waiting around all day in vain.

But the explanation for WHY my appointment had been unilaterally cancelled was where things moved out of Annoyingsville and into Wackytown. Apparently, in the alternate universe where Sears lives, the chain part of a garage door opener is not considered part of the garage door opener; it’s considered part of the door. Turns out that this distinction (ridiculous in any case, because the chain CLEARLY came out of the Craftsman box along with the opener) is important to Sears. It turns out that the Garage Door Opener guys and the plain old Garage Door guys are located in different parts of the labyrinthine maze that is Sears Home Repair…. and apparently they don’t talk to each other. At all. Maybe there’s some kind of a Thunderdome-esque rivalry between Garage Door Opener guys and Garage Door guys, or something???? I’m at a total loss here.

It goes without saying that nobody at Sears thought it would be a good idea to forward the name and contact information of a customer who wants to give Sears her money to the RIGHT department. This is the part I really don’t understand. I’m practically a certified shopoholic, and my cash is always welcomed wherever I go! Why is this so difficult? Stop playing hard to get, Sears! Take my money…. please!

TL;DR Version:
Sears Home Repair website is great, but Sears’ human customer service system is just about as broken as the (STILL broken) chain on my Craftsman garage door opener.

Do you hear that, Sears? Kristi would like to give you money so that someone in the (possibly mythical) garage door department can come and fix her Craftsman garage door opener. She has no special demands. She doesn’t want a warranty repair. Just a good old-fashioned exchange of money for services.

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