Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Sears Never Fails

We've needed a new TV ever since we moved our 14 year old 32" CRT TV to the bedroom.  It still works and has a decent picture, but it takes up a lot of room.

When we renovated the downstairs, we thought about furniture placement and where the TV would go.  We carefully measured so that our older buffet would fit between the two new windows and it ended up being the perfect size for a 46" Flat Panel TV.

We've been putting off buying the TV for about a month, but with company coming it just had to be done.  Valerie did her research with help of her sister who is in the business and we decided on either a Samsung or Sharp with Internet connectivity for downloading Netflix movies.  She found the best price on the Samsung at Sears and saw online that our local Sears had exactly one left.


We arrived at Sears at 10:25 and they opened at 10:30.  We were the first ones in the side door, but still managed to get to the electronics department with four people ahead of us.  I kind of felt sorry for the salesman because there was five people waiting and he was the only one in the department.  Of course, the first person on line had to do a return and then a purchase and he wanted his discount for opening a Sears credit card.  Awesome.  He needed a manager override for the new price, and helped the next person at a register at the front of the department.

After about 20 minutes, we tracked him down at the front of the Electronics department helping other customers.

"Oh, I'm helping people up front now", was his explanation when we finally got to him.

Our salesman's associate was explaining the "Extended Warranty" to his customer when the customer said "It's a scam, no thank you."  Our salesman stopped what he was doing (helping us) and explained the virtues of spending an additional $250 on a $800 TV.

The customer was a little smart alleck and asked the salesman, "Are you saying that my TV won't last three years?  Maybe I better go somewhere else to buy it..."

"No, no, no, it's a good brand, but it's just like insurance!"

The other customer politely declined again and our guy got back to us.

"I see we only have one of your model in stock, I have to go and verify the inventory", he told us.  I kind of appreciated this considering what happened last time.  He came back in about 20 minutes and sure enough, they didn't have the unit.  Didn't even try to sell me another brand, a bigger size, or a different model.

As we were walking out, I said to Valerie that Sears never fails to disappoint me.

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