CT Blue

Inasmuch as this is my blog, and I have now reached the age at which I can officially be deemed a curmudgeon, I am going to vent my spleen regarding a certain matter that has little if anything to do with politics, but quite a lot about why certain corporations are having their clocks cleaned by Amazon, from whom I avoid purchasing anything if I possibly can.

Last week I decided to buy a dehumidifier. Lowe’s had none in stock and the salesman expressed no interest in getting one, so I went to Sears. They had three on display, but the one I wanted was not in stock. I bought it anyway, and was told it would be in the store today for me to pick up. Or, more exactly, it would probablybe in the store today, but I should certainly not count on that. Delivery to my home (about 10 miles from the store) since the delivery charge would be $69.00 more than the free that Amazon would charge me.

So, today I tried calling the local store at the number on my sales slip to see if the dehumidifier was in. I got a recorded voice who told me to tell her which department I wanted to talk to. She told me that if I wasn’t sure which department I could say “Department List”, but when I said that she insisted she couldn’t hear me. She hung up on me a couple of times before she finally heard me, and I got: yet another recorded voice, this time a male voice, who told me he could certainly help me. However, I told him I wanted to speak to a human being. He tried to reason with me, but I insisted, and finally I was switched to a human being. It quickly became clear that this human being had never been near Waterford. He eventually was able to find my order and tell me, with absolute certainty, that my purchase was scheduled to be in the store today. Not that it was in the store, but that it was scheduled to be there. That was the best he could do for me, but he was trying to be helpful, so he gave me the telephone number for my local Sears: the exact same number I had called in the first place. Needless to say, I declined to start the process all over. The curmudgeon in me asks: is it really too much to expect that I should be able to talk to a real human being at the local store? The thinking brain in me wonders how Sears expects to survive with customer service like that.

I often wish I could have been a fly on the wall at Sears board meetings in the early 1990s, where, I like to think, there was at least one person saying that Sears should take advantage of its nationwide scope and distribution system to sell things on the internet and deliver the next day. They could have done it, and had they, Amazon would be just a not so fond memory that Jeff Bezos would nurture as he asked for spare change somewhere in Seattle. But I’m sure that lonely voice in the boardroom was overruled by the majority, which insisted that, like digital photography, the internet was just an unimportant fad. Now Sears occupies a large and mostly empty (of people) space in our local mall, which itself is mostly empty. Sears will no doubt declare bankruptcy in the near future. Meanwhile Amazon continues to suck the life out of retail everywhere, and the loathsome Bezos (but then, Sears and Roebuck were probably loathsome too) is the world’s richest man.

I have to go now. As it turns out, I could have gotten a quicker answer to my question by taking a trip to my local Sears instead of calling them. So, off I go.