Sears Hometown Stores

We were glad to have a Sears store open up in Franklin because we have a lot of Kenmore appliances and we could get pieces and parts for them. It is a nice small conveniently located store. While buying the appliance, my husband had specified that it had to be ready for LP Gas. The delivery service was terrible. The machine was not ready for LP Gas. This was a major issue for us. My husband went ahead and tried to get it converted and had to run around a lot. We were not sent the right conversion kit. We eventually decided to take it back, and they did take it back, but it took them a week to come and pick the thing up. It was a pretty expensive dryer worth about $800 or $900. It was in my kitchen for a week. We had to get another one urgently because my daughter was sick at that time, and we really needed it to dry clothing. When he finally came, the franchisee came with an old suburban and a trailer, and my husband had to help him load it onto it, and there was ice everywhere. I felt bad for the guy. I felt that Sears had left that guy hanging. When I called them, I encountered a lot of automated calls, and their explanations seemed to be about third-party services and things like that - it was terrible. I felt like they did not back up that fellow that had the franchise; I am pretty sure it is a franchise store. However, I feel like it was entirely the store owner?s fault. They were clueless in their response about it. Most people that live in a rural community have LP Gas, and they should have been aware of that; a Sears store in an urban area is not expected to sell an appliance for LP Gas. We needed a plumber to come and convert the appliance to LP Gas, and they didn?t even make the pretence of converting it, but they said that they would. We have really been pleased in the past with the durability of the Kenmore appliances and wanted to follow with that because other stores don?t offer Kenmore. My husband and son went in to another store on a Saturday morning and picked a new dryer up and brought it home themselves. We had no problem getting it working, and it was ready to go. The dryer from Sears was in my kitchen for a week before the franchisee came to pick it up. He did not even have a proper way to secure it to the back of his trailer. It looked like he was not sure how he was going to get back into town; it was pretty amazing. They refunded all the money. They credited it against our credit card. I was nervous because they credited the money back to us before they picked up the thing. We had to cover it with a blanket and hope nothing would happen to it before they came. We did not want to destroy it or have it damaged here before they came and took it back. They were not installing it, so we had to put it there. It was supposed to come to us ready to be installed and it was supposed to be set up. My husband worked with it for hours and yet could not get it done. He had so many different fittings. He looked on the website and everything to find the right conversion kit, and he did not find one. They did not know where they could get us one from. They were incompetent. If we had gone ahead and just attached that to the wall, it could have been very bad. The price was comparable, and that is why my husband bought it in the first place. I felt bad for the fellow who owned the store. At other times that we have been in there, the people that are hired are sort of indifferent to me because I am a woman. Their check-out services are poor. They seem clueless when I go in there; they are kind of hanging out and watching television or something. They also have a lot of things that would be convenient to buy locally. I buy my vacuum bags there. It is nice not to have to order them online or go someplace else to get them. There are yard things that we would like to get, but I?m wary about buying anything from them again. It seems to me that they do not understand customer service at all. They don?t understand responding to a community or the needs of an individual location. A lot of times, it looks like I am getting a lower price from them, but when they add in the installation charge, it is about $150 more, and I find that kind of deceptive. We don?t find out about the installation cost until we are ready to check out, because they tack it on at the end. At other stores, it might look like the price is more at the beginning, but it ends up being the same. There has been one time or more that we have not continued with a purchase because we found out that there is a hidden or obscure fee, which is usually substantial. They use sales people to try to sell things, and that gets very irritating. I would not recommend them and would not use them again in the future.