Sears
Maintenance Agreement Claim Refused After Lawn Tractor Caught Fire

I bought all my tools from Sears - I loved the idea that everything had a solid guarantee for performance, maintenance and replacement, even if I did have to pay extra for it. If there was a maintenance agreement, I bought that too, and I did thousands of dollars worth of business on appliances, tools and equipment with Sears... Before my experience with my lawn tractor.

It was a dry fall afternoon and I looked forward to getting home from my teaching job to get a few leaves up with my Craftsman lawn tractor which sported a dual rear bagger on the back. At 3.5 months pregnant, I was feeling great and glad to be outdoors. Toodling along through the trees in the front yard, I noticed that there were tiny sparks coming from the bottom of the engine, so I put the tractor in reverse to disengage whatever might be caught under there. Tiny flames started to appear and they became larger. I got off the tractor and ran to the back yard for a hose. By this time, the front end of the tractor was fully engulfed in flames and reaching toward the dry leaves on the trees. I hooked the hose up to the spigot in front but the water pressure was low and the water barely reached the flames.

People had started to stop along the road and the flames were spreading through the dry leaves. Someone called the fire department while I tried to keep the water from the hose directed at the flames. The smoke was thick and I was panicking, thinking all the while that the flames were going to reach the house. The fire department came and put out the fire in a couple of minutes. The tractor was a smoking, melted mess and my front yard was burned up.

To make a long story short, I went inside and called my husband and then I called Sears. I had a full maintenance agreement on the tractor (less than 2 years old) and after countless hours on the phone with Sears offices in various locations over the next two years trying to get them to replace the tractor and baggers, the most I got was a refund for the balance of the maintenance agreement on the tractor. Sears' story was that their maintenance agreements do not cover their merchandise involved in fires, even though they are the cause of it!

Our next tractor was a Deere, and although I still think the Craftsman ran better, I'll never buy another from Sears.

Company: Sears
Country: USA
State: Virginia
City: Colonial Heights
Address: Southpark Mall

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