Our 1980s GE dishwasher still functions, but my wife felt it was high time to get one updated to this decade. A few weeks back, we shopped a couple of well-known chain stores in that massive shopping theme park that is the north end of Manchester, CT. I'll leave store names out of this, but the experience was not good. Given the number of other choices within one square mile, I would have thought they'd be more on their toes about follow-through, but no. Once we (my wife, really) decided on one, the salesperson assured us that we could have it delivered within a few days and wrote "ASAP" all over the order. We received a rather intense sales pitch for an extended warrantee, but we stood firm in opting out.
When we got home, we realized that there were significant unexpected added charges. We called them back quickly and got it rectified. "It must have been a computer error," they said. OK, fine. Several days passed and I called the store to get an ETA for our new purchase. Nobody could tell us definitively, but they said they'd let us know. OK, but they curiously wasted no time in putting the charges on my new store credit card. Their follow-up call never came, and after yet another week passed my wife got ahold of someone who said a manager would get right back to us. They didn't. Now my wife wanted to cancel everything, but they didn't seem to believe her and said they could deliver it by the day before Thanksgiving. With holiday preparations, that was not going to work. Finally, a call to the main corporate office brought a sympathetic ear who agreed this was not the way to do business and they cancelled it. I would hope a systemic failure to come through within 16 days on something not special-ordered would prompt some repercussions from the top down, but it's someone else's problem now. Meanwhile, we make do with 1980s technology as the search for a new dishwasher continues.
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