Buy a product online and then pick up your order at the local store -- it sounds like the best of both worlds. But when a reader's wife tried to buy a vacuum cleaner through Sears.com recently, she found it can actually combine the worst of the e-commerce and store shopping experiences.
"My wife ordered a vacuum from Sears.com," a reader recently wrote. "Sears.com informed my wife that she could pick her order up at one of the Sears stores conveniently located nearby, so she went to the Sears store in Santa Monica to pick up the vacuum. When she arrived, she was required to swipe the credit card she had used to order the vacuum and then her order popped up on a screen. She hit 'continue' and a storeroom clerk was paged to fill her order."
So far, so good. "The storeroom clerk came and checked her order in his mobile stock fulfilling device," the reader wrote. "He then checked off everything and went to pull her order. The vacuum was not in stock so he couldn't fulfill it, but he had no way of notifying the system that he couldn't fulfill it. So he sent my wife down to the vacuum department to see if there was a comparable unit there."
A salesman in the vacuum cleaner department tried hard to find the reader's wife a substitute but was unable to do so. "He said that in order to fix this, he would need to credit back her order and then reorder it from the Sears Store system," the reader wrote. "Before he could do this, my wife would have to get a credit return number from Sears.com. Sears.com said they would e-mail my wife the number shortly and she should wait in the store where the salesman would give her access to a terminal where she could get the e-mail. It never arrived."
Another call into Sears.com yielded a promise to send another confirming e-mail to a different address within an hour, but it didn't materialize either. "By that time, the store was closing and my wife was in tears,'' the reader wrote. "She has no vacuum cleaner, but Sears.com's order fulfillment system thinks she does. She tried to get the store manager to give her something in writing verifying that she did not have the product she ordered from Sears.com ... which the Sears store processed as delivered but couldn't deliver. The manager couldn't be bothered, told her that it was time for her to go home and she would have to take care of this herself through Sears.com. There was nothing Sears Stores could do about it."
Over the next few days, the reader and his wife called Sears repeatedly to try to rectify the problem. "So far, the three calls I've made to Sears.com has left me with some hope that I will see a credit on my Discover bill within the next several days," the reader reported. "Though my wife was assured twice and I was also assured twice that we would receive at least an e-mail confirmation, on the third call I was given a flat denial that anyone at Sears would have suggested that they sent out e-mail confirmations of credits. At this point, Sears.com has over $400.00 of our money and their computer fulfillment system thinks we have a vacuum. All we have so far is a wasted evening, stress, tears and more phone calls to make."
Even weeks later, the best Sears.com could do -- other than empty promises -- was to suggest to the reader that he attempt to reverse the credit card charge for the vacuum cleaner. "I had called again and was repeatedly promised that they would credit the account post haste," the reader said in his last report. "Tonight, I called and was asked by Sears.com customer service why I haven't disputed the charges with my credit card company? Discover has initiated that process this evening. My wife and I will never purchase anything from Sears again, nor will we be patronizing K-Mart which now owns Sears."
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