Complaint Review: Sears Parts Direct

I didnt select ex employee when filling this out because I worked for an agency who rented my services out to them and still work to this day when needed. Anyway, Sears has a long history of messing up part orders, and will do their besr to get away with it if they can. As for the part they messed up on, tell them to pick it up and have your bank do a chargeback in the meantime.

One of the biggest reasons they get the wrong part, is because they dont order the parts from the company who made them, they order the cheapest generic part they can and charge the highest price for it wether it fits or not, wether it works or not. Second reason for getting the wrong part plus the long months wait is also because if they dont have a generic replacement, they just wait for a item of same type to be returned dead and use it for parts. Now for some history:

Back in the early 80s when I was a kid and had a job delievering newspapers, I used part of my income to buy computers, and harware to run BBS. BBS were basically similar to what the internet is today. I even got a Sears Credit card at age 14. My first bad experience was when I bought a Commodore 128D that was dead out of the box. Upon examing the PC, I noticed the systems serial number did not match up to the box it was in. I brought it back to the store and they outright refused to take the system back, even blamed it being broken as my fault being a kid.

Back then I didnt know the laws that protected consumers like myself and refused to take no as an answer. They actually called the police on me which turned out to be the best thing they did because when they showed up and both the store and myself told our sides of the story, the officer noticed something that I didnt. And that was a yellow sticker on the bottom of the computer that said refurbished. The officer had his partner get a philips screwdriver and opened the computer case which had two more similar stickers plus a hello kitty sticker which the manager saw and at that moment turned so pale, I thought he was dying. Found out later on why.

The two stickers inside had both name, address, and phone number on one, and the other part numbers to what should have been replaced but wasn't. The officer started to tell the manager he was in the wrong but got interupted by him stating he now realizes what happened and would replace the computer for me and I made sure to say that it better be a new one which he did make good on. After the officers left the manager apologised again to me then picked up the old rotery phone and called the number on the PC and I wasnt to suprised when he got someone on the other end and told them he found their PC and that it looks like it isnt repaired but will make some calls to speed repairs up.

As it turned out and that call told me a lot, was that the store somehow lost another customers repair which that manager had left to be shipped out at one point to another repair center. What ended up happening was someone took a display box and reboxed it and put it onto the sales floor which I ended up buying. The hello kitty sticker the manager saw that made him go pale, was because he had given that sticker to the customers daughter at another point in time who put it on the inside of the computer. Makes me wonder why they bothered to do a repair on it the first time if they saw it because C128D's have a tamper seal and if broken, voids the warrenty. Anyway, I got a new computer which died weeks later and Sears Credit decided to just write it off which is even more rare then winning the lottery. 

Story #2. The wandering s****.>

It started up with the electric starter fine, but the blades would not turn. I finally got my mom away from it to take a look and found that the safty screws that are supposed to break should someones arms or legs get cought in it were never installed. It took Sears a year to order the correct part so I did a work around and used normal bolts. My mom got to do half the driveway before she gave in to my brothers and my whining to let us give it a run. As I said, that year it was needed the most due to many snowstorms we had in NY back then.

Before we completed clearing the entire driveway, the unit stalled and never ran again. This was back in 1984 I believe. About every 3 months the repairman would show up with a generic incompatable part and kept this up for a year. I dont know what my mom said to Sears, but whatever it was, with all the snowstorms we had that year she got them to plow our driveway for free. After so many trips, Sears decided to take the s****.>

It somehow made it to Arizona. The man who called read the phone number off the repair sticker hoping if he had our s****.>

Only english written part was my name and address. In the envelope were the strangest looking bolts with notches running up and down the kength of it and only about 4 centermeters of threads at the end for the nut. It wasnt till Sears repair center called that we realized what the item was. It was the safety bolts from the first s****.>

You think this is over? No way, I have more to say. Disaster #3. Believe me, about 20 more problems happened, but Disaster#3 takes the cake and so I dont bore everyone, will be the last problem Ill write about Sears, for now. Its funny watching on youtube, delievery people getting caught throwing, kicking, even driving over peoples packages and not knowing their being recorded. What happened in I believe 1989, I wish to this day we had cameras and had caught Sears doing this blunder. Im not too worried being sued because it was Sears who delievered the items and kept the invoice that shows it as well. Sorry, dragging this on a little more. Disaster #3 I remember so well, because it left a sinkhole that to this day if you looked at Satalite pictures you can easily see as the only swampy forest in long island. How did this happen? Ill tell you. NY Long Island gets its fair share of hurricanes, and each one has just about completely destroyed the patio furnature.

My mom decided to get cast iron chairs and table what could withstand a hurricane, she hoped. Never got to test it when Hurricane Hugo came to visit. You see, my mom ordered the new set from Sears and had hoped the patio set would be delievered and set up before Hugo hit. Because off all the chaos it was causing in other states, youd think the set would come late, but because Sears had been messing my moms orders up that year, the manager pulled something Sears never does, again like winning the Lottery. They delievered the set EARLY!!!!!!!!!!! On time is rare, late is a given, Early, that never happens!!!!!!! Unfortunately, no one was home to accept the delievery, nor did we know at the time Sears was trying to do something good without being forced. So what happens? The delievery driver calls the store to let them know, no ones home.

Makes me wonder which neighbor was pestered to make the call as Cell Phones wernt really available like they are today. The dept manager told the driver to unpack the furnature and throw it in the back yard so when we got home my mom would be suprised. The driver most obviously was short a few brain cells because thats exactly what he did. Being the gate was locked, the only way to get the furnature into the pool area was to throw each item over the fence. The driver threw 4 cast iron chairs and the table over the fence.

How he/she did it, the world and myself may never know. It was done, but done very badly because the spot he or she picked was directly in front of the pool. In ground pools can be cement, tile, or rubber reinforced underneath by steel plating as thin as a quarter. Our pool as awsome as it was, was comprised of a rubber liner and steel/alunimun plates. Cast iron chairs, cast iron rable, do not mix well at all. When the driver sent the furnature over the fence, they went directly into the pool and sank to the bottom. The chairs and table ended up piercing right through the plating. We got home at night and didnt even know of the delievery. Following day, the storm hit. Was fun and scary to watch, but from outside came a sound that for a brief moment, was louder then the storm itself.

I turned on the back yard lights but half of them remained off, or so I thought. I ran up to the second floor and opened my brothers window which isnt the brightest thing to do during a hurricane. Sorry if Im getting the times off, this was like 26 years ago. Peering throuh my brothers window the loud sound we were hearing was the plating being crushed like thousands of soda cans all at once as the cement walkways and dirt fell in on themselves making a very large sinkhole. My brother and I watched as the other lights went out as they got pulled in as well. Was a domino effect. It wasnt till the next day that we saw the full damage done and that Sears lost us as a customer for good. 

Disaster #3 looked like the acoplypse. The cast Iron Pateo furnature put what looked like 5 holes about the size of a quarter each into the deep end of the pool through the liner and steel/aluminum plating. When the delievery person lobbed the furnature over the fence, it went directly into the pools deep end where it did the damage. Under the pool is a drain line that has a flood gate to prevent sewage from entering the pool. Two of the five holes went through the plastic drain piping so as water went through the holes, it dragged sand and dirt making the openings larger and oh yes, the outdoor pool caused the drain in the basement to reverse and for several days we had a 5 foot deep in home pool.

Im not even going to mention what had to be done to the basement. The pool completely emptied itself, not sure when, but from what happened my guess is during the beginning of the storm. With the water gone and youd think 5 feet of water in the basement is a big sign something is wrong with the pool, but we had the storm so had no way of knowing till it was too late. Again, with the water gone there was no longer any weight holding the pool together. High winds, tuns of rain now turned the empty pool into a huge drain/sinkhole. As the mud pressed against the sides, they gave way  like a landslide, under the weight of the cement walkways which started falling into the void.

As this happened, the surrounding lights got pulled in and steel/aluminum plating gets crushed under the weight making the loud sound similar to thousands of soda cans getting crushed which is where my brother and I discover something is terribly wrong and watch the remainder of the lighting being pulled in with everything else. The only thing still standing in the back untouched is the old 8 foot radioshack satalite dish. The cabling for it was torn into the sinkhole. Over the next 25 years the pool turned into a small lake for frogs and wildlife has reclaimed the back yard as being very unstable, its been unsafe for lawn maintenance to be done and trees now grow where grass once did. The whole place looks like something out of a horror movie and yes, Sears got away without a single dime for the damage done.