The Timing Is Just a Coincidence...

...but I think we have a better picture of at least some of the reasons for this today than we might have had last week: Sears marketing president to leave.

Retailer Sears Holdings Corp.'s president of marketing, Dave Friedman, will be leaving the company to pursue other opportunities, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

...The news comes at a time when the retailer, home to brands such as Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances, faces tremendous pressure to boost sales.

Sales at the company, where hedge fund manager Edward Lampert is chairman and the biggest shareholder, have fallen every year since it was formed through the merger of Sears and Kmart in 2005.

Maybe having a hedge fund manager run your company isn't a good idea. Who knew! I'm no Professor of Businessology, and I only worked in marketing for eight years, but I have noticed that, when your chairperson doesn't seem to understand the intrinsic—if not easily quantifiable in Quicken—value of investment in impeccable customer service, treating it instead as an extraneous cost that can be easily eliminated in order to maximize profit, it gets to be a hard sell to customers whose loyalty has been used as an executive toilet.

Again, I'm no Dame Businesshead PhD over here, but I do seem to recall reading something, probably in Popular Mechanics or Ranger Rick, about how it costs a lot less to retain an existing customer than win a new one—and a lost customer who must be won back is the most expensive of all.

Anyway! I wish Sears the best. Go Team Money!

Sears shares were down 2 percent to $77.80 in early Thursday afternoon trading on Nasdaq.

Whoooooooooops.

[H/T to Shaker knitmeapony, on Twitter.]

Sears/Kenmore Follow-Up

Background here and here.

I've not heard hide nor hair from Sears since I spoke with Dee again yesterday, which is fair enough, since the only thing I want to hear from them is that they're working intently with the manufacturer on a recall, so I'm not the only person with this issue who's offered a free repair, and that's not something in which they seem to be very interested.

I have also, however, not heard from Kenmore, after they publicly accused me of not having tried to contact them, even though whoooooooops I did. Kenmore has also suggested that my failure was in tweeting at them directly, instead of sending a DM (direct message), despite the fact that their Twitter account is prominently displayed on the front page of their website without such a direction and the troubling little issue that it's impossible to send a DM to someone who is not following you.

And then there's this: If you send a DM, no one else sees it, and if this whole episode has proven anything, it's that Sears/Kenmore only respond after someone makes a lot of noise.

Every single polite and private entreaty I made before posting about this was ignored.

When I spoke to Brenda C. in customer service, I told her point-blank at the end of the conversation that I would be writing about it and exactly who my audience was. I also asked her if there was someone else, e.g. a PR person, to whom she'd like to direct me, and she said no.

So even having warned them that I would make a public stink, they still didn't care.

UNTIL I DID.

Which suggests to me that the only reason Kenmore wants to get direct, i.e. private, messages is because they're easier to ignore.

If Kenmore would like me to have a different, and more favorable, impression, then perhaps their one and only direct contact with me should have been something other than claiming to have "no previous knowledge" of this situation, despite the fact that my very first tweet was directed at them, and then "apologizing" if they "missed something." Not an apology for wrongly snarking on their Facebook page about how I never contacted them, but, you know, for if they missed the fact that I did indeed contact them.

How to Create a Public Relations Nightmare 101, by Sears/Kenmore. Chapter 7: Fauxpologies.

Here's the thing: The first place we went when we were looking to replace our dishwasher that also broke last weekend? Sears. The second place we went? Sears Outlet Store. Yep, the first two places we went to price dishwashers were Sears stores. You know why? Because we were happy with our stove, even though it had just broken.

I'm not an unreasonable person. I understand things can break. I figured Sears/Kenmore would deal with us fairly.

Well. We just bought our new dishwasher at Lowe's.

Sears/Kenmore Follow-Up

Background here.

I left several updates in yesterday's thread, but I wanted to do a follow-up piece to let everyone know where things stand.

Toward the end of the day, Dee from Sears Executive Office rang me and offered to send someone 'round to replace the broken panel, free of charge, and give me a 90-day warranty on the new part.

It is an offer Iain and I ultimately declined, because I frankly did not feel good about accepting service in what Sears certainly expected to be an exchange for my letting the issue drop, because I am not letting the issue drop.

I'm not seeking anything further from them in terms of reparations to me, personally. My stove is now my issue. But I have some grave concerns about how this issue is being handled by Sears with its other customers.

If my stove had still been under warranty, it would have been fixed for free, and I never would have started down this road. But I did—and now I know not only that this is a very costly repair (especially relative to the price of the stove), but also that the repair is being made with the same faulty part that cannot withstand typical use.

Sears isn't fixing these stoves; they're patching them. People who get it fixed under warranty may end up with the same broken bracket again a year later, and face a pricy repair then. People who pay for the pricy repair once may end up with the same broken bracket again a year later, and face a pricy repair once more. Sears is kicking the can down the road, and expecting their customers to foot the bill for the problem.

It's a nice little racket, though, to replace a shitty piece with the same shitty piece, and sell $100 extended warranties on the back of a $300 repair—extended warranties that last one year, which seems to be the approximate lifetime of the bracket.

Sears/Kenmore clearly knows the piece is faulty. Dee told me that Sears plans to "address the problem" in the future, but when I explicitly asked if there was going to be a recall, and if I should advise my readers to not pay for a pricey repair on a stove that would be recalled, she said she could not confirm that there would be a recall, nor that future repairs would be made with a different, improved part.

So, on the one hand, they acknowledge having sold a bad product to lots and lots of people, and, on the other, they won't promise to do anything about it.

What they want to do is offer to fix patch the stove of the person with a platform and the willingness to use it to make some noise, and hope that the whole thing will go away.

Sears/Kenmore needs to do better by ALL its customers. Not just me. And they need to something more serious than what is essentially a patch on a known problem.

(I will note that there is also the possibility Sears/Kenmore is already actually repairing the stoves with better pieces, in which case that's just a different problem—charging people to do what they should be doing for free with a recall.)

As I said in my post yesterday, this is a low-end model Kenmore stove, bought primarily by people unlikely to be able to purchase "optional" extended warranties in the first place, unlikely to be able to afford $300 repairs, and unlikely to be able to buy a new stove when faced with a $300 repair (plus $100 extended warranty!) to avoid giving more money to a company that exploited them.

Six months after Louis J D'Ambrosio took over as CEO of Sears Holdings in February of this year, he was given a $2 million bonus, bringing his total compensation to $3.15 million. He is the 27th highest ranked CEO within the retail sector.

How many people have paid costly repair bills to replace a part Sears/Kenmore knows to be faulty, in order to give Mr. D'Ambrosio a $2 million bonus?

Do the right thing Sears/Kenmore. Recall this stove. And don't charge another person for a shady repair.

* * *

Note: Kenmore is reportedly deleting critical comments from its Facebook page, and @KenmoreConnect did not respond to tweets. Sears has been more receptive: Tweet at them @sears, @SearsHoldings, @SearsAppliances, and @SearsCares.

ACTION ITEM: Kenmore Products Are Garbage, and Sears Is Terrible to Its Customers and Employees

This, too, is why people Occupy Wall Street. Read on for the unbelievable experience I had with Sears/Kenmore, which treats both its customers and its employees like shit.

As I mentioned yesterday, our Kenmore stove broke over the weekend, one week after the warranty expired. (And please note that I did not name Kenmore yesterday, as I assumed in good faith they would make an effort to resolve the situation decently.) What happened was that a bracket which holds the panel in place broke. It's a flimsy little garbage bracket, and I can't even believe that it passed Kenmore's quality inspection, since pressing on that panel is how you make the stove work.


So we called Sears and scheduled a repair. Just to get someone out to evaluate how much the repair to our year-old Kenmore stove was going to cost was $75. We were not thrilled, but okay.

This morning, the repairperson, Craig, called to tell me he might be able to arrive earlier if that worked for me. On that call, I explained to him what the problem was, and he told me that the repair would likely cost around $300. This is more than half what we paid for the stove. Not only that, Craig explained that he was able to estimate the cost because he had replaced at least five of those panels in Kenmore stoves in the last week. He informed me that it was a known problem, and that Sears was supposed to be working on a fix for it.

I told him that paying more than half the price of the stove for a repair one week after the warranty ran out to fix a known problem by replacing it with the same part that was breaking all over the place was unacceptable, especially since it's just kicking the can down the road to another parts failure and another $300 repair. He agreed with me that it was awful, and he would try to get the company to comp the repair.

At this point, I want to note that Sears, were it a responsible company, would be recalling this Kenmore stove. If one area repairperson is reporting 5+ repairs on the same part a week, and Sears is charging exorbitant repair fees to each customer whose warranty has expired, that's some straight-up chicanery, right there.

I also want to note that the Sears salesperson from whom we purchased the Kenmore stove did not encourage us to purchase the extended warranty, but, in fact, told us how his wife has the same model and it's been awesome for years. I remember very explicitly that he told us it was easy to clean (despite not being a self-cleaning model) and telling us that it had not needed any repairs.

So, on one end, we had a Sears salesperson conveying how we didn't need an extended warranty on this model to get his commission, and, on the other end, we have Sears repairs telling us that now we need to pony up $300 for repairs.

Well, isn't that a great customer service exploitation model!

Back to this morning: Craig calls me back and tells me that Sears will not comp us nary a penny on the repair of our Kenmore stove. He apologizes profusely. He tells me he understands why I don't want the repair, and offers to cancel the appointment for me. I thank him and assure him he has no reason to apologize.

Craig gives me a number at Sears repairs to call, and suggests that I call them myself. Maybe I'll have better luck, he says.

So I call the number, where I speak to Brenda C. I explain to Brenda C. the problem with my Kenmore stove, and she is barely listening and refers to it twice as my "refrigerator." I correct her: It's a stove.

I also tell her that I believe it's unreasonable to expect their customers to pay more than half the original price of their Kenmore stove to fix a known problem for which the company may or may not be developing a fix, but in any case does not yet have a fix, and thus would be replacing the faulty part with the same faulty part.

I ask her if she believes it's reasonable to ask me to pay $300 now, and $300 when the insufficient part inevitably breaks again. She tells me that once I pay this $300, then I can purchase an extended warranty for $100, which will cover it in future. But I can't purchase one now, because the stove is broken.

I laugh.

I point out to Brenda C. that it feels like we are being penalized because our Kenmore stove broke too late to be covered by the warranty that ran out last week, and too early to be repaired with a new part that won't break. I ask her if she thinks this is fair, for which she has no answer, except to reiterate I can buy an extended warranty once my Kenmore stove has been repaired for $300.

I then ask her why Sears has not issued a recall for a Kenmore stove whose most important part is known to be defective. She tells me that the repairperson who told me that information shouldn't have told me and she will be reporting it to his manager.

So now Sears is not only screwing over me, their customer, but screwing over their employee who had the unmitigated temerity to be honest with me and try to get his employer to do the right thing for me.

And not only is Brenda C. planning to file an internal employment complaint against Craig—she's TELLING ME ABOUT IT, which I cannot understand as ethical by any definition of ethics that I understand.

At this point, I request that the stove needs to be repaired for free, or it needs to be replaced—because it is in no way appropriate to tell a customer that they have to spend $400 (including the $100 extended warranty), which is nearly the original cost of the Kenmore stove, to fix what is a known problem to Sears. She offers to discount $100 on the repair.

Which, of course, is not a real "discount" of any sort, because she's just told me I need to spend $100 on an extended warranty if I don't want to spend another $300 on this repair in the future, every time that flimsy little bracket breaks.

I tell Brenda C. that I am unsatisfied with that resolution, I will not be taking her up on her offer to discount the repair, and I will not be buying another Kenmore product again. She says she hopes I change my mind.

I tell her that I hope I will change the minds of my international readership, which is predominantly female—and I trust she knows that women do the majority of the purchasing of household appliances—should any of them be contemplating purchasing Kenmore products in future.

* * *

Sears knows it's got a faulty product. Sears doesn't care. Sears is going to bilk its customers out of every last dime of repair costs for its shitty Kenmore stove that it can, instead of doing the right thing and recalling the affected stoves and replacing the weak bracket.

Why? Because it might cost them money.

And they'd rather make money off of their unwitting customers—people who are buying a low-end model Kenmore stove, and are thus probably the people most unable to afford to purchase optional extended warranties in the first place, the people most unable to afford $300 repairs, and the people most unable to buy a new stove so they don't line the pockets of a greedy corporation that's content to exploit the people who bought their faulty product in the first place.

This isn't just about me. This is about all the customers they're treating this way. I just happen to be the one with a platform.

And to boot: They're going to punish their employee who was honest with me about the problem.

This is why people are Occupying Wall Street.

Let's make some noise.

Contact Kenmore at their website, on their Facebook page, and tweet at them, and call Sears Roebuck to let them know that you are aware of their dodgy corporate practices toward customers and employees and will not be spending your money on any of their brands until they revise their corporate policies toward people who work for and buy from them.

* * *

I have posted an update, such as it is, here.