It’s a good time of year to remember Sears, Roebuck, and Co., once mail order megalith from which exciting and mysterious packages would arrive to the wonder and expectation of kiddies everywhere. As a kid I used to spend hours poring over the toy section of the Sears catalog and dreaming around this time of year.
Well, good ol’ Sears has made a dream come true again this year. This has turned out to be one of the most practically useful web sites of the year for me:
www.searspartsdirect.com
My 1995 Craftsman garage door opener stopped working a few days ago, leaving the door stuck open, and when I hit that web site, within minutes I had pinpointed the exact part (drive gear & sprocket assembly) that I needed to fix the problem. Another five minutes saw an order submitted for about 40 bucks.
Last night I was bumming about the garage door being open before the big Detroit snowstorm of ‘08. Lo and behold, like the star-struck kiddies of yore, how my eyes lit up when my wife presented me with that mysterious package from Sears.
Fast-forward through four hours and a couple of customary expletives, and my wife and I were gleefully cycling the automatic 1/2-hp-motor-driven garage door up and down, up and down. The precise directions included with the specific part needed for our 13-year-old opener made the replacement straightforward (though never expletive-free for one with thick thumbs). Needless to say, dry garage this morning.
One may say that the above site is not a marketing site. But that site and the accompanying attention to detail in the parts process did more for my Sears brand opinion than any Sears marketing to which I’ve ever been exposed.
Even their acquisition of Kmart didn’t go as far (close second, though – OK, not really).
Matthew Williams