Sears review: Irreparable washer & shattered trust.

My family have been loyal SEARS customers for generations. I spent summers in a SEARS catalog family home in the Catskill mountains, SEARS did my auto repairs and maintenance and so on until they shuttered a few years back. My dad still has a workshop full of Craftsman tools. Need I go on? Mostly smooth transactions for decades on end, I had no reason to believe the quality I came to know and trust would be any different in 2023.

Boy I was wrong. For comparison, we bought a small apartment stacker in 2014 from the SEARS in Hackensack, NJ. In 2018 the washer began leaking and running off-balance. We had a SEARS tech come out and fix it within a week of my call. Running good as new!

In 2019, we bought our new home. Complete with an ancient, broken washer. So on Black Friday, I took myself and a pickup truck down to Hackensack, NJ to meet with my trusted sales rep and select a top-notch GE machine at Black Friday pricing. It ran as expected until mid-2023. Then, without warning began bouncing around violently during a spin cycle. Denting itself, moving several inches. It sounded and felt like a car drove into my house.

I called SEARS warranty replacement services and was met with nothing but aggravation from the start. Sales pitches for overpriced home warranties, no appointments available for weeks forward. They scheduled me for a week later at an inconvenient time, and never showed up. No call, no show. I had to track them down. Terrible communication.

When the “tech” finally showed, days later, he said he was ordering parts. They would be here in 3-5 business days and he would be back then.

A week and a half went by before I called. Machine is irreparable, I will be getting a replacement. The only “comparable” machine was a tremendous downgrade from my original machine. Half the features were missing on the proposed replacement. I was forced to pay an “upgrade fee” and still the replacement machine that took months to arrive with more no-call-no-show delivery dates, hours on the phone and rude customer service representatives. It was barely worth the extra money and some of the features from the original machine were not available.

As far as money goes, the washer being out of service for months created a tremendous hardship for our family. Hundreds of dollars spend at laundromats and time that could have been better used at home doing my laundry there. SEARS denied my claim for a measly $50 for for the weeks of laundromat reimbursement, citing some ridiculous loophole. In reality, I spent upwards of $65-90/week doing our family’s laundry outside the home.

Never again. What a sad state Transformco has dragged SEARS into. Generations of long-time trusting customers, marching into a doomed carnival of greed and deception. Don’t waste your money. Buy local. SEARS used to be those local folks. Not anymore.