Sears - sucking big-time since last week

About a month ago, Jane won a really nice TV set. a 36" Panasonic Tau series 36SL13, to be exact. Cool, huh? Well, it was, but it was also useless to us - we have a hi-def set in our family room, and we don't need anything that big anywhere else. So initially, we were going to eBay it. But beforehand, we decided to see if we could find out where the promotional company got it, and see if we could exchange it for something else we needed - namely, a new refrigerator.

The promo folks told Jane that they'd gotten it at Sears. Meanwhile, it's sitting unopened in our living room. We went to the local Sears, told them what was up, and they said "go ahead and bring it in, and we can work out an exchange". So, last Sunday, our friend Jeff and a co-worker of his came over and we loaded 250+ pounds of TV into the minivan. We drove it off to Sears that afternoon.

Finally, we get a call from them this morning. They won't do it now. Jane wound up reminding the store manager's secretary (because the manager wouldn't get on the phone) about how much we've spent there on major appliances alone over the last decade or so (our current fridge, our stove, the original washer/dryer we bought when we bought the house, the fancy new ones we got last year, our first big-screen TV, among others), and also pointing out that we weren't looking for cash - we just wanted to exchange it for something we needed instead.

We'll see, but I think once a store gets into Bureaucratic Weasel mode, that's it. If they stay there, we will do our best to force them to bring it back here, and then we'll eBay it. We'll also shred our Sears card and that'll be the last money we ever spend there. If they'd said from the beginning that they wouldn't do an exchange, we wouldn't be mad at all. But we actually went to the trouble of delivering it back to them. That makes it personal.