When Sears pisses off the wrong blogger
A year ago, a Richmond woman named Sapna purchased a stackable washer and dryer and a five-year warranty for them from Sears. In October, she came home to puddles on her floor because of a leaky washer. She then attempted to get Sears to make good on their warranty to fix the washer, and as you’ll see in full detail if you follow my link below, Sears proceeded to screw her over whole-heartedly and with little remorse.
Only there’s one thing Sears wasn’t counting on. Unfortunately for them, Sapna happens to be dating a professional news journalist who happens to know the power of bad publicity and how to stir it up; that is, she’s dating me.
After about the fourth screw-up, I decided to take action. I went to my computer and wrote an email to the editors at Consumerist. For those who don’t know, Consumerist is a Gawker-owned blog that averages over 200,000 readers a day. I summarized Sapna’s dilemma and asked if they’d be interested in investigating it. An intern wrote back that same day and said she’d like to hear more, so I had Sapna write up a detailed narrative of every which way Sears had screwed her over.
After sending the email to Consumerist, it wasn’t long before they posted it on the site.
Just think about it: The Sears customer service thought that they were dealing with a single irate customer. But because of the age of Web 2.0, when the person you’re pissing off on the other line could well be a blogger with thousands of daily readers, consumer trends are changing. If this had happened 10 years ago, Sapna would have been forced to deal with the problem and then rant and rave to close friends and relatives. There would have been bad word-of-mouth (which is never good for a business), but it would have been limited to a few people. Now, not only do the readers of this blog know about Sears’ bad customer service, but so do 200,000+ readers at Consumerist.
The playing field, as they say, has been leveled.
UPDATE: Frequent reader Stephen Ward gives his own account about when he was screwed over by a company. Be sure to read the comments in his post from people who were turned away from the company after finding his post via google:
Small businesses should be especially wary in this day and age. My wife and I had an issue with a home assembly company named Tiny Details. My negative post about them now ranks #5 in Google for their brand name. Just from commenters, I know I’ve cost them a lot of business. How’s that for negative PR?
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Small businesses should be especially wary in this day and age. My wife and I had an issue with a home assembly company named Tiny Details. My negative post about them now ranks #5 in Google for their brand name. Just from commenters, I know I’ve cost them a lot of business. How’s that for negative PR?
I too have had a bad experience with Sears. I don’t really know much about blogging, but saw this and was compelled to say something. Today after waiting almost 12 hours for a sears repair person to call regarding MY APPOINTMENT to repair my snowblower. I called at 3:45 p.m. to be told my repair person was on the way. Great I thought, I confirmed and thought he would be here any moment. Went out for 10 minutes to get ready for him. They apparently called when I didn’t bring my phone with me. I called immediately when I returned and I was told they had cancel but would have him come anyway. Well, 4 phonecalls later and still no recourse. Amazing they don’t have any supervisors to speak to; and told me I may have to WAIT ANOTHER 3 WEEKS FOR AN APPOINTMENT!!! It is also very difficult getting thru their automated system to get to a real person. Then you wind up speaking to people that are a bit difficult to understand. So, even after being promised that someone would call. Guess what? NOPE! So now I wish all the people that waste their time waiting for these retail giants could get even. Thanks for listening.