On Saturday August 20, I had a service representative from Sears out at my house to repair my refrigerator (which was a Kenmore but not under warranty). The internal water dispenser and automatic ice-maker were not working at all.
After re-connecting the hose, the technician had to enter a solution into the computer to determine price. The one that came closest to the work he did was Tubing, Repair/replace. That solution to my problem ended up costing me $123.00.in the technician comments on the receipt (copy enclosed) he stated that he put the tube back on the water valve.
I am not having any issue with paying for the service call. What I am having an issue with is the cost involved in something simple and quick. It took less than 1 minute for me to describe the problem, took the technician 1 minutes to fix the problem and 3 or 4 minutes to input the necessary information into the computer. The time spent actually fixing the issue in relation to the other aspects (describing and entering information) of his visit were miniscule by comparison. The technician even felt that this figure was staggering because of the work he did. (He also indicated that there was nothing he could do about it because Sears took away all discretion for situations like this.)
My wife called the customer relations and a return phone call was placed by Rita. Unfortunately, she simply told my wife that there was nothing she could do about the charge; that it was set by headquarters based on a survey of current field charges. It appears that you are averaging your cost out amongst all your customers, regardless of actual time it takes for the work to be performed. I doubt any company charges $123 for 1 minutes of actual work (plus computer time). She said our only alternative was to write to corporate, hence this correspondence.
We then wrote to corporate headquarters and received a call opn September 2nd from Linda who told us the same thing, the charge was correct and they would not refund the difference. Apparently you are charged the same amount for the job no matter how long it takes (and reconnecting a hose that's come undone is the same job as having to completly remove and put in a new hose). I have warranty contracts on my washer and dryer, but aside from that I will not use their service for ANYTHING and I am very tempted to never even shop at Sears again.
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