It’s time to choose your appliances and endure the mostly unpleasant experience of choosing your appliance store.
But how do you choose?
Right now, you have 60 appliance deals just within a 25 miles radius of Boston, not including all the internet dealers, and it’s probably somewhere in your area as well.
However, like almost everything else, your choice should be determined by answers to certain questions.
In this article, you’ll learn what to look for and more importantly, what to stay away from when choosing your next relationship with an appliance store.
Some of these tips will surprise you, but you want your project to run smoothly without problems or delays.
Table of Contents
Salespeople
You may think this is obvious, but it’s not for the reasons you think.
You want your salesperson to ask the right questions. You buy the right appliances for how you cook and live.
Yes, you want to know what they’re talking about as well. A few actually do. However, most probably won’t.
What’s more important is the communication before, during and after the sale.
The beginning will probably be good because they are trying to close the sale. In the middle, and after the sale is more critical because your designer and contractor will need specs, answer some questions as well as delivery information.
So how they follow up is more important than what they actually know.
Warehousing
Warehousing is one of the weakest spots in the supply chain for years. The appliance industry has plenty of products available.
You can buy a kitchen of even premium appliances and have it delivered within 30 days.
Now many brands are six months to a year, or even more. So with appliances now arriving at different times, where does your dealer store them?
Storage is a huge concern. So the question to your salesperson is, where will we be storing my appliances and for how long?
Delivery
You should think of deliveries another way. What is your time worth?
Let’s say you’re paid $50 an hour. Many appliance deliveries have four hour lead times.
Your appliance will be traveling at greater distance with more variables from our more remote internet dealer. So at 4 hours, the real cost is $200.
Many dealers, including many of my competitors, now allow you to track your delivery through their website to only 30 minutes. The real cost of delivery is $25.
Equal competence between every delivery person is assumed here, and that’s a pretty big assumption. So you want to check reviews, and you’ll learn a bit more about how to track competency later in the article.
Installation
Lack of skilled labor is another issue. You see hiring signs everywhere and construction in Boston is at an all time high. Finding good people in our industry is tough because as an industry, people are typically paid less, with some exceptions.
So what is your dealers policy and installation?
Do they have people on staff who arrange it with a third party, or is it on you to arrange?
Don’t assume anything. Your contractor is probably pushing back on installation because they are having a hard time finding people.
In our industry, even a mundane task like installing panels on a refrigerator will take a first timer
or somebody unfamiliar 4 hours to complete.
Service
Service is the biggest problem in this industry. Very few dealers have service departments, even fewer still have good service departments.
Not to slander myself, but we are now eleven days out on non urgent calls. We will return the same day next day service of 2019 by the first quarter of 2023.
But what is your store’s position on service? Do they have service?
If they do not, then find out who they recommend and have a conversation about their service lead times before you buy.
Reviews
Reviews are the single best tool in comparing stores. What former clients say about a store is way more important than any advertising, blogs, influencers, or even industry people like me.
Be careful, many of the review sites are third party platforms for the seller.
You should only trust two sites, Google and Yelp. Call me masochist, you should look at the bad reviews. Every store will have them. Nobody is perfect.
That said, you want to read what happens after the mistake. How did the stores respond? Did they make a legitimate effort at mitigating the issue or was it a canned response that really went nowhere?
Conclusion
First, forget about your salesperson choosing appliances for you. Yes, you want some ideas, but only a few can do that. It’s more important for them to be responsive.
If everyone’s talking about a broken supply chain, then you’ll have to discover how much warehousing your dealer really has, by asking.
Your appliances have to be stored somewhere until you need them. The lack of good skilled labor, finding good delivery installation service may be more important than choosing the right appliances.
Lastly, verify everything by checking reviews. Check the percentage of good to bad reviews and then read the responses. That will give you the best insight.