“Recently Sears had a serious competitive edge on a single aspect of buying a dryer,” writes Bedford. If you’re curious, that aspect is that Sears will set up a dryer to vent from the side while most appliance retailers won’t, but that isn’t really important: what matters is what went wrong when the delivery team showed up with his fresh new dryer, and how Sears dealt with the issue.

The transaction went through successfully and the delivery crew showed up, which is already pretty good by normal Sears standards. Then the time came to unload Bedford’s new dryer from the truck. Except by “unload” we mean “drop on the gravel driveway.” First it fell, and then one of the installers managed to make matters worse. “He quickly grasped the dryer with both hands and twisted the dryer as it sat on the gravel driveway, and you could hear my new appliance scream,” Bedford explains. When he asked why on earth the installer would have tried moving the appliance off the truck by himself, all he could offer to Bedford was that the damage was only on the bottom of the dryer. For some reason, Bedford was not placated.

He had his old dryer re-installed and sent the new one away. Delivery errors and accidents happen all the time, but a good retailer will make it up to the customer and make sure that they receive the undamaged appliance that they paid for, right? After the botched delivery, Bedford drove over to Sears to straighten this all out and asked to speak with a manager.

“The operations manager balked at even coming to speak with me,” he says. “Then he was so very flippant, it blew me away.” Someone who contacted him by phone from the delivery department was equally flippant, and Bedford closed his first message to us by wondering whether he should just go ahead and put up some clothes lines. He held off until the company’s next delivery attempt, the following week. When the truck arrived, Bedford got a surprise.

“Today, a delivery army brought my new dryer home,” he wrote to us earlier this week. “It consisted of 3 delivery men (if you can believe that) driving a lift truck and the manager of the [local store] delivery operations. The new manager that is.” There had apparently been a change in staff in the last week, and the store manager dispatched the small dryer-delivering army.

“So there we have it, Sears still has some spunk left in it,” notes Bedford. Maybe so: if they keep going with this whole “hiring people who aren’t actively hostile to customers” thing, they just might make it.

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