Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Last week I ran over a suburban rock and ruined my lawn mower blade; ordered and received a replacement from sears.com; installed it; discovered that it’s an inch longer than the previous blade and won’t work; called customer service; waited on the phone for 15 minutes; was told that the part had been appropriate for that mower; was given the phone number of the Parts and Repair Center nearest to my home; found that number had been disconnected; called the main Sears store in the vicinity; was eventually connected to lawn & garden; was told to call the Parts and Repair Center at another number; was told to bring the part in to the center, which is located a mile away from the Sears store in a K-Mart; drove 45 minutes there, where they declined to sell me anything but the blade I already had, and told me that if it didn’t fit something else must be wrong with my Sears Craftsman R mower, which they had never seen. They did refund the price of the wrong blade, but I was stuck for the shipping, and of course I was no closer to being able to mow my lawn than when I first hit that rock.
Come to think of it, I should’ve bought my lawn mower from them to start with, and not from a dinosaur company with most of the bad qualities of government and few of the good ones.
