A high quality appliance manufacturer is bought out and lowers standards of products and repair service. The image of the bored appliance repairman is a myth.
Requiem for an Appliance King
Anyone out there planning a kitchen remodel? Planning to buy new appliances? Well, I don't have a remodel in the works but I did recently replace an aging and cantankerous refrigerator. The poor thing had served us well but its sunset was rapidly arriving.
Now, in our household we have always bought a certain brand of appliance because of dependability. That's why their commercials shows that bored repairman. So, I was free of the chore of brand shopping, I just needed to shop for features. (Oh, and my wife insisted that it match the dishwasher...)
I found just the right one! Everything was fine – for a while. We stocked it up with food both fresh and frozen. Then, about an month later, the water and ice dispenser went wacko. You know that bored repairman? Mythical. They outsource their repair work to a third party.
They work like this: wait a week for the guy to come. He diagnoses the problem. But he carries no parts. Their company is “streamlined” by having a central warehouse in another state. He orders the part and it arrives a week later. Only then is the repair made.
It turns out it was a circuit board. And an Internet search revealed that it has been a known issue for several years. But they keep selling and fixing them rather than redesign the board. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Two weeks go by and the compressor goes out. You guessed it; weeks with no fridge and several hundred dollars of food lost.
Is quality a thing of the past? The Internet tells me this company had been absorbed by another. The brand is just an illusion now. But we still have the image of the bored repairman to console us.
