Here’s a good one.
Our dishwasher broke sometime in mid-December. We called someone to come in and look at it. My husband got the flu, so we had to postpone. He came in, said we needed a cheap part and that he could probably get it within the week. Took him another week and a half to get it and get it installed. It promptly broke again a week later. He came out again, said it was another cheap part, and that he’d be back within the week. I said “Great, because one of us will be home all week anyway.” It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and my kid’s day care was closed.
Whole week went by, and nothing. We started calling after the holiday. At first, they tried to tell us that they had no record of ever having come out to our house, but then we got the service number from the previous visit, and they said they’d “look into it.” We followed up twice that week, and again the following week, when they finally told us that they’d have someone out. The boss came out yesterday, and told us that our four-year-old dishwasher needed at least $250 of work to get running again, and another $150 to be good-as-new due to a rusting-out rack. No thanks. We decided to get a new dishwasher, after getting the run-around for a MONTH as to whether or not it was fixable.
So last night, my husband went to the grocery store to get Sears gift cards in the amount we needed to buy the dishwasher we’d picked out online earlier that day. We do this all the time for big-ticket items, because the store offers discounts on both food and gas depending on how much you spend there, and gift cards count. I went to Sears online and ordered the dishwasher, paying the few dollars extra of sales tax with the same card that we used to buy the gift cards. About 30 minutes later, Sears sent us an e-mail saying that we had to use another form of payment, because the Discover card was declined. The link to do so, however, didn’t work, so we had to call Customer Service. They informed us that since the Discover Card was declined, they declined the entire purchase, INCLUDING the gift cards…which take up to 5 days to refill.
By the evening, all but one $100 gift card had refilled, but after a month of no dishwasher, and knowing that the installation date went from the 16th to the 23rd just by waiting from the afternoon to the evening, we had no real choice but to order the dishwasher and pay another $100 out of pocket. We’re going to use the gift card, and then never buy anything from Sears again, not to mention cancelling the Discover card, who saw fit to freeze the card based on fraud for something we’ve done multiple times (we bought a HDTV on Best Buy gift cards purchased from the same location five months ago, FCS). What a freakin’ mess.