Ariel has read Consumerist for long enough that, given a choice, she probably wouldn’t order a dishwasher from Sears. But she rents, and her landlord is not so wise. Here is their sad but familiar tale: lots of delivery appointments, missed days of work, and no dishwasher.

I’m unfortunately in the middle of an experience that is eerily similar to that described in your September 8th post about Wesley and his dishwasher. As a longtime Consumerist reader, I would never have chosen to do business with Sears, but as a renter, I do not always have the power to make that choice.

The dishwasher in my apartment has several things slightly broken and is in need of repair. It’s also quite old. My landlord saw its condition on a recent visit concerning another issue and decided to replace it entirely. He ordered a dishwasher from Sears that was supposed to be installed sometime during the day on the 30th of September.

My boyfriend and I waited at home all day (we’re grad students, so that means missing a day of lab work) and no one ever showed up. So, we rescheduled for the next week. Same situation — waited all day, no one ever showed up (I ended up missing a friend’s birthday party to wait).

At first we had been told someone would get there in the morning, then the story changed to the afternoon, and when no one showed up in the afternoon, we got no further word except that we had to reschedule. We rescheduled for this past Monday, the 10th, and again were met with no installation and radio silence. Rescheduled again for the afternoon of Tuesday the 11th, at which point the installer finally showed up — to my landlord’s residence, half an hour away.

At this point my landlord and I were both spending over an hour on the phone with Sears each time an installation was scheduled, trying to find out what was going on. My landlord is furious and feels terrible and I am quite irate. What I was told on Tuesday was that the address was wrong in their system. We rescheduled for this afternoon, the 14th, and I was given a promise by the Sears representative that the guy would 100% definitely show up this time (haha, yeah right — I asked what would the consequences be if he didn’t and of course there were none).

We called the contracted installation company, [redacted], this morning, to make sure we were still on the schedule and were told that the tech would get to our apartment (we checked the address with them to make sure they had the right one) between 4 and 6 pm, definitely. Of course this didn’t happen, and when we called [the installation company] at 5:30, starting to wonder where the tech was and why he hadn’t called to give us our “I’m half an hour away” warning, we got an answering machine — everyone was gone for the day.

I called Sears yet again and was told, to my dismay, that it was possible [the installation company] didn’t even service addresses in our zip code and that because the address was (still!) wrong in the Sears system, they might not have contracted the correct people. I was then asked, yet again, when I’d like to reschedule for, with no mention of switching installation companies or any other sort of fix.

Possibly the most frustrating part of this experience has been that every single Sears representative says the same things — that they’re very sorry and when would we like to reschedule for? But they have no actual fix for the problem. It seems like rescheduling yet again won’t help. I don’t know what to do at this point. I have no idea why the address is still wrong in their system when they’ve known it was wrong for almost a week. Even if the address was wrong, that doesn’t explain why the guy just plain didn’t show up to scheduled appointments on the 30th of September and 7th and 10th of October — maybe if he’d gone to the wrong address the *first* time, we could have fixed this before trying to deal with it for two weeks solid.

My landlord and I are both fed up and I really don’t know where to go from here.

Wesley and Ariel, for the record, do not live in the same city.

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