Elucidation (or for those of you in Rio Linda: an explanation and some clarification)
First off, I’d like to thank Carey at Consumerist.com for running an article on my situation, hopefully bringing a bit of exposure to this sorry affair Sears.com has managed to drag out for far too long.
For those of you who think my life was literally ruined by this, I put the subheading on the front of the site stating that it was an exaggeration. There is such a thing as humor in a bad situation, and this was certainly one of those cases. As for those who think that this is making a mountain out of a mole hill: Sears.com is listing completely incorrect information for certain manufacturer part numbers and has the wrong item pictures linked to the wrong units. I informed them about this almost 3 weeks ago, and they still haven’t corrected their mistake. I also ordered a fridge that said “In stock” but they lied about that and then tried to get me to wait until May 30 to receive the fridge. Sadly, May 30 still hasn’t arrived yet, and it seems like forever ago that I had that conversation.
And the “life-ruining” dryer situation is only the more drawn out of the two problems: remember, I bought a refrigerator that was “in stock and ready for delivery” to my zip code, but ended up being “Not in stock, and we don’t know when we’re going to get it from the manufacturer.” I don’t know how a company takes a person’s money with the understanding that something is in stock when they HAVE NONE OF THEM IN THEIR POSSESSION FOR DELIVERY. Isn’t that illegal? What kind of inventory management causes this to happen? Are they running Oracle .9i on DOS? SEP, the fake version made by CS students in Karachi? Or is it that Sears.com is just plain crooked and they like it that way?
My life hasn’t been ruined, thankfully, because though I do have some high credit card balances, I do have the financial means to not let this situation cause too much of a problem. Imagine someone who isn’t so lucky: someone who had to save their money, someone who didn’t want to use second-hand or found-on-the-sidewalk appliances so they buy their appliances on a sale at Sears.com, only to stay home from work two days and NOT get the correct appliances. What kind of a financial situation would they be in? Both of us deserve accurate information at the point of purchase, both of us deserve truthfulness when speaking to customer service reps on the phone, and both of us deserve not to have our money held an excessive amount of time. Would anyone care if this didn’t happen to me and it was a less well-off family who didn’t have the knowledge to make a website such as this? More importantly: would anyone notice?