Sears, seared into her memory

At at least one point in our lives, we’ve all been touched by the infuriating madness of a customer service fiasco. But while being on the receiving end of a c.s. nightmare severely tests the strength of the vascular walls of the blood vessels in my forehead, I find reading about complaint stories cathartic. The VerizonMath saga is a classic in the genre, and this recent one about the opera buffa Megan McArdle has been going through to get Sears to repair her washer deserves a hallowed spot too.

I wish I knew Megan well enough personally to warn her to avoid Sears like a Chinese dairy product. For some time the company has been notorious for its shoddy customer service, but the problem was likely exaggerated by the 2005 merger with Kmart, another troubled retailer, recently arisen out of bankruptcy. Market watchers at the time hailed the merger of the two retailers into Sears Holdings and touted it not so much as a retailer but as a Berkshire Hathaway-like “working man’s hedge fund”, helmed by wonder-boy hedge fund manager Edward Lampert.

Critics, however, claimed Lampert wasn’t really interested in the retail business and was merely stripping the company, carrion-like:

Sears essentially gave up on pleasing its customers awhile ago. Early on, it was considered more of a real-estate play — or even a quasi-hedge-fund vehicle for Chairman Eddie Lampert — than a retailer. It slashed marketing and store spending while raising prices. Rundown stores, disappointing inventory and higher prices chased business away and got people out of the habit of shopping there.

You can really see proof of the critics’ point when you look at what Sears has spent on store upkeep in the past—something on the order of 20 percent of what its main competitors spend on a per-square foot basis. So, in effect, Megan and the other poor souls patronizing Sears have been shopping at a hedge fund vehicle rather than a retailer.