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Review 5/19/2010
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Last July 2009 we bought an Elite Sears dishwasher for over $1,000. We soon noticed that sometimes the dishes were not clean and found that if we didn't pre-wash the plates and glasses then we often had to wash them again. We also discovered that if we interrupted the wash by adding a glasses or plate, the machine would inconsistently restart from the beginning. Further we found the dishwasher would sometimes take over two hours to wash the dishes and even then the dishes were not always clean.
Then pieces started to fall off, wheels, dividers, unknown plastics pieces, etc. until an entire wheel assembly fell off during the wash and then lodged next to the heater element where it melted into a lump. That was on Wednesday (5/12/2010). On Saturday (5/15) I went to the local Sears store to get the wheel assembly and to complain. The Sears salesman said he was surprised by the problems I had had and said that maybe I had got a lemon. He said that his parents have the machine and had not had the problems we were having with our machine.
We had bought the extended warranty and he got on the phone with the Sear Home Services people. He told them what parts were missing and then put me on the line with them to set up the appointment. I told the Home Services people that I thought that the machine was a lemon and was told that the service tech would fix the machine on Tuesday and evaluate if it should be replaced. The Tech came on Tuesday (5/18), did not fix the machine, did not make any statement about replacement, and then had to order the parts (that the Sears Salesman and I had told them were broken).
Called today (5/19) and was left on hold for over 18 minutes. Customer service woman told me that two of the three parts were scheduled to ship, but didn't know when they would ship, couldn't say when they might arrive, and that she didn't know the status of the third part. This person continuously messed up my last name (Kirk-pat-rick shouldn't be hard to say, in my opinion) which further irritated me. She also told me that I could not schedule the repair tech until I had the parts, delivery dates unknown. I then asked for a manager and instead she connected me with another technical person who couldn't do anything. After 25 minutes I was connected to a "supervisor", who also told he couldn't do anything since the scheduling department was closed. But he was able to tell me that the Service Tech was now scheduled to out on June 3rd. Two and one half weeks after my visit to the store. I pointed out that both the Sears salesperson and the Service Tech on Saturday had said that I could get a new unit to replace the lemon. He told me that it took at least 4 service calls for the same problem before they would consider a new unit.
We bought 7 GE appliances when we moved into our new home in 2003. All have failed and been repaired a number of times throughout the years so we are looking to replace them with something more reliable. But as bad as GE appliances are, at least they know how to do Home Services. Since when we set up the appointment with GE they ask what is wrong, then most of time the GE repair person has the parts on the truck. GE does what they can to get their product working as fast as they can (the problem is the amount of repairs required). Sears is a series of runarounds and "I don't know" or "I can't". I really can not tell if the Sears' products are as bad as GE (check Consumer Reports), but the Sears service is very poor.
The warning I want to communicate is one of slow, confused and poor service from Sears Home Services. I, obviously, also don't recommend the Sears Elite Dishwasher.
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