Sears, Kmart closing up to 120 stores

The greater problem, in retail and elsewhere, is that there isn't much money dedicated to customer service anymore. Too many jobs have been chopped away to increase profit margins, and the problem feeds on itself and escalates from there. In these horrible economic times, companies that return the focus to customer satisfaction might benefit in the long run.

People usually go back to places that treat them right when something goes wrong.

 

Is it a 52-inch LCD or one of those giant flat screens? If it's an LCD, are there any able-bodied family members that can help (I wouldn't expect that with one of those gigantic big screen things.

I understand where y'all are coming from, but I wouldn't trust ANY retail outlet to come out and pick up something and bring something to replace it. A mom and pop shop, yes. But with any huge company, these things tend to be handled very poorly.

 

She wasn't sure it would fit in her SUV. But the manager went out with her to measure her car to make sure it would fit (customer service!). She figured it would be more convenient for all involved to have Sears take the old one when they delivered the new one. She and my dad did take the old one back and bring in the new one. (I'd left by then).
I figure Sears is cutting costs by contracting with third parties to do the repair and delivery stuff. But the crappy way they handled it was less than desirable. And it clearly isn't the case of one bad employee, the people my mom dealt with were nice, but hamstrung by procedures aimed more at serving the company than customers.

 

I agree it's crappy, but maybe it's the cynical part of me that expects this from any large chain for exactly the reason you talk about. They tend to get hamstrung by corporate procedure instead of dealing with the people in front of them. I don't see it as a Sears problem per se, so much as I see it as a problem with large corporate chains.

Now, somebody might come back with an anecdote of great customer service from Best Buy or somewhere else, but I'd bet you can just as easily find a Best Buy experience similar to the customer service experience your mom got from Sears and one might be able to find a positive experience from Sears just as easily as one may find one from Best Buy.

My experiences with Sears, as I said earlier, have been positive. But I'm not so naive as to think that reflects on anybody besides the folks I was dealing with on those particular days. And it was because people were willing to put aside corporate procedure, get something done, and deal with the corporate procedure on the back end. In other words, they allowed me to exchange the TV in a way that was not company policy, but the decision was made to make it "fit" company policy in the computer.

 

Federal Express doesn't know what you're talking about.

 

Nice.

 

I can tell you a disaster story involving Samsung, UPS and a TV warranty that I never h

The poor delivery company can really be put in a bind.

 

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a precision machinist and had a small business with my father. One of our big customers (sometimes our only customer) was a supplier of power tools (drills, saws, etc.) to Sears. We'd make some of the tooling that company used on its production lines. If you go to a Lowes today, you'll see the same supplier's products, made in the same plant we serviced, on the shelves; they just have that company's name on them rather than the Craftsman brand. My point is that Sears was really the original outsourcer*. Almost nothing sold in a Sears store was made by a Sears employee.

*Back in the days of the Sears mail-order catalogs, the teenager version of me ordered 5 lbs. of honeybees from Sears. They were shipped in the mail from Jesup, Ga., which is home to several apiary supply houses. Sears had simply served as an intermediary between me and a particular supplier. Got a bemused phone call from my local postmaster wanting to know when I might be by to pick up my package. I think "the sooner the better" might have been thrown in there ...

 

What is being described about Sears' poor customer service is the exact reason Kohl's is making it big across the nation -- don't know how many of you have one of those yet, but we got one in California a couple years ago and it has come to the point where we rarely shop anywhere else. We just bought furniture there, and my wife noticed the genius of their return policy. That was one of the big reasons we bought from there, because we knew they'd come and get it no questions asked, so we buy from there and then we end up keeping 90 percent or more of the stuff.

Very good, very helpful store if nobody has tried it yet.

 

Sears, US retail giant, files for bankruptcy - CNN

Sears sucks, Crash. I once worked there. Sold Lady Kenmores.

 

For Sears and K Mart, the beginning of the end was when they refused to sell Spinal Tap's "Smell the Glove" album. #BobbiFlekman

 

Nasty work. Nasty work.