At a recent trip to Sears to buy 3 major appliances with a total of nearly 4300.00 my wife and I had a rather pleasant turned sour experience.
Day 1: Shopped in store, picked out numerous appliances we liked and ended up ordering all 3 that day.
Day 1: Later that evening, my wife was looking online for competitive prices, to see if we can go back and make an even better deal. Success!
Day 2: Return to store with print outs for local — and i mean local as in 3 minutes down the street competitors - Lowes & Home Depot.
The Home Depot Pricing & their Response
We were informed that the pricing from their website was not valid as the site said "Internet Special" — yet we had just been in the home depot, and they had the same prices in store. They had a 10% mark down on all prices in the appliance department. The general manager of the Sears stated that while they could match the standard price for the refrigerator they would not honor the 10% off price. If we had done as the GM had stated, we would've saved around 200.00, not the 400.00 we would've saved going to Home Depot. While this made little sense to my wife and myself as as price is a price, whether its a 10% discount or a 150.00 mark-down, its still a discount. We canceled the order for the refrigerator.
Lowes Versus Sears
We then had another price we wanted to match. This one I was thinking would be difficult, as unlike the home-depot price match, we had 'slighlty' different product numbers from Sears to Lowes. While both had matching features, the item numbers were off by 1-2 digits. Same model, same look, same buttons, dimensions etc. They of course did not match this either.
End of story? We really liked how our original sales person helped us, we despised how Sears treated us in regards to the price match policy.
Below is a more detailed recollection of the event:
While i spared the above details the emotions involved, the first reaction to our attempt to price match by the sales person was to brush us off and tell us they could not do the match because they were 'internet prices'... For a local B&M.
After pulling over an area manager who quickly read the print out and said yup, can't do it, and walked away... We pressed more for added help. We were told we would need to go to home depot, bring a copy of the pricing over for them to match it for Sears to consider matching the price.
We responded with doubt that we should need to go through the effort if a phone call & our print out from the website should suffice. After this pleading, the sales person said fine, and ended up calling home depot which confirmed the pricing.
She found out our price was correct, but then said she still could not match it — because the Home Depot dept had a 10% mark down, and they do not match that. With shock, i asked for a manager again. She said we had talked to one already, and I pursued further, when finally the GM of the store arrived.
She then confirmed both that we couldn't match the price and it was all that she could do, but to match the 'non-sale' price at Homedepot, which was already 200.00 less than the sears price. We denied this and canceled the order, as it would save us 200.00, but not the full 400.00 that Homedepot could offer.
At this point, including the attitudes we had been given, we knew matching the prices on the washer/dryer would be a lost cause as in that scenario, the item #'s were slighlty different between Lowes & Sears. We canceled this as well, and ended up going to the local two competitors, paying less for the products and NOT paying shipping.
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