Sears phone and online store should die

Having tired of my 3-hour round trip commute, I recently decided to move down closer to work. The (prospective) new place would not have a washer / dryer by the time I moved in. A friend tipped me off that Samsung washer and dryer models with decent reviews were available from Best Buy at $425 a piece. If I ordered the same models from Sears, I would get 10% off the difference between Sear's original and Best Buy's price. In addition, I would get free delivery and installation. Big mistake - it took me an hour and a half to order the washer and the dryer and another hour and a half to cancel the order. And I am still not sure if the order canceled.

When I first called one of Sears' local stores in the Bay Area, the phone system transferred me to a national call center. The rep - "Daniel" - at the national call center was nice enough to help me set up the delivery date, find the appropriate power cord for the dryer and verify Best Buy's price. But then he hit some unspecified snag with the order system and said he would have to transfer me to someone who could fix it. Before I could ask for a confirmation number, I had been routed to what turned out to be a local Bay Area store. The local rep who took the call, did not have access to the National call center's system - he said that the National rep's transferred to him all the time, even though he didn't have a way of helping the customers who came his way. He also did not know Daniel.

So I called the National call center and asked for Daniel. Who of-course couldn't be found. So I went through the process of order the same washer and dryer all over again. This time around the order went through, seemingly smoothly. But when I got the confirmatory email from Sears, the price on the washer + dryer was ~$400 more than what I had agreed to and the washer model was slightly different from what I had ordered. At this point I decided that the Sears phone/online was not competent enough to reliably complete this offer. Instead of fighting this further, I decided to go into full-reverse and cancel the order.

I called back into the National call center. The rep who took the call said she did not have the authority to cancel the order and transferred me to another number which rang and asked me for telephone number to pull up the order, but then greeted me with mocking silence. I hung up, called the National call center again, asked for the answering rep's supervisor who said she would transfer me to appropriate person. This person happened to be the same local store rep that I had called earlier. The poor guy recognized my voice from earlier in the day, repeated that he couldn't help me and gave me a toll-free number to try. He still didn't know Daniel.

I called the toll-free number and punched in my phone number. Silence. I waited for 90 seconds. Nothing happened on the other end.

I looked up the email that I had received from Sears regarding my order. It listed a number for Delivery that I thought might be helpful. I called the number, punched in my phone number. Silence.

At this point, I was getting pretty desperate. I called back the National call center, and chose the option for new orders. When I got a helpful sounding rep - Amanda - on the phone, I told her my sorry story. Fortunately she decided to help me. She attached a note to the order indicating that the order should be canceled. She did not actually have the ability to cancel the order. Amanda requested that I call the Delivery phone number - one of the ones that had gone silent on me earlier - and ask the Delivery folks to cancel the order too.

I decided to call Amex instead, to stop payment on the Sears charge.