There’s Still Time

I read in the Los Angeles Times today that the company that owns Sears and K-Mart is going to shut down 120 locations this coming year in order to save money. It seems that their holiday-season performance was disappointing, and they’re trying to eliminate the stores that are losing money. This trend is disturbing to a lot of people associated with the company, not least of all because that’s what happened to Circuit City and Borders over the last few years, and both companies just entered a death spiral that wiped them out completely. But while it’s hard to deny that Sears has image problems with both their brick-and-mortar stores and their online services, I can’t help thinking that my recent experience with them shows they still have time to pull back from the brink…

A few weeks ago I went online looking for a new piece of exercise equipment. There aren’t that many sporting goods stores in East Lansing, and none of them had the model I wanted, so I turned to Amazon to see what they could do for me. Sure enough, Amazon had the product I wanted, and even with shipping could match the best price anyone locally could order it for. I went ahead with the purchase, and a week or two later the product showed up at my house – except that what arrived was not the product I’d ordered. I had purchased a Schwinn recumbent bicycle; what they took off the truck was a Nautilus treadmill. We refused delivery of the product (since it wasn’t what we had ordered), and I called Amazon to find out what was going on…

The Amazon telephone rep was polite and competent; there was no problem finding my order, and he said I was correct in refusing the delivery. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell me where my purchase had gone. I asked him to just send us another unit, and after a longish delay, he came back and told me that they couldn’t. The machine I wanted was backordered, and would not be available until the end of February – more than three months away at that point. He couldn’t tell me if mine had been the last one in the warehouse, or if their website had failed to tell me that the item was backordered, or what the failure might have been, but there was nothing he could do about it. He also made no effort to resolve the situation (beyond a rather lame apology); he said there was nothing he could do at his level, and on consideration I believe him. But that still left me without the merchandise I wanted, or any way to get it…

I told Amazon to cancel my order and went on the Sears website, where I found the same machine in less than a minute of searching. The list cost was similar, and while Sears normally charges more for delivery, they were having a special that made the whole purchase comparable (if not as cheap). Sears has not had a good reputation lately, especially in terms of their online service, but I took a chance on them anyway; it would be hard to do any worse than sending me the wrong product and not doing anything to correct the problem. Surprisingly enough, they had the product in sale, set up the delivery correctly (and on time), and were willing to carry the product downstairs to the room we wanted it in (which the delivery people from the air freight company Amazon uses were not)…

Now, I’m not saying that every online competitor is going to lie down and let Sears run right over them the way Amazon did in this story. I’m not even suggesting that Sears doesn’t have problems; their stores are run-down and out-of-date, and their customer service and online ordering have been less than stellar. What I’m saying is that no one out there seems to be providing what I would call first-rate service on large items purchased online – which means that if Sears can do so reliably, there is still a place for them in retail, and there is still a market segment they can not only compete in, but dominate…

If they bother to try, of course. Time will tell…