If you Google Sears Sucks, you’ll get about 317,000 results. So I’m hardly breaking new ground here. What I’d like to do is tell you is provide an example as to why Sears sucks, give you an opportunity to vent your spleen about Sears, and hopefully convince a few executives to pay attention and/or a few people to give up on Sears and shop elsewhere.

Excerpted from the recent annals of Sears’ home service web chat exit survey, which I recently took time to complete:

OK, if high-quality, efficient customer service is the point of all this, I have to laugh. First thing I did was Google “Sears service” plus my Sears’ location, hoping to find a direct number to call. No service number. Only a general number for the location. So I called that number. I then waded through a preposterously poorly designed phone bank – Service, which I found out is only findable directly if you happen to know in advance it’s called “Parts, Service & Repair” – might want to make the voice-recognition system recognize parts of that compound name and or similar names; got news for you Sears, no one is likely to know your precious little term for this offhand. Then I’m in “Waitsville” for about 20 minutes. While waiting, I thought I’d try to find something online and discovered the home services site. But there’s nothing in the UX that tells me where to go to get status on a repair!! So after several fruitless clicks, a chat invite automatically pops up. Note any UX person worth their salt will tell you that auto-triggered chat popups are a last-ditch option for bad websites seeking not to fail users completely. Nevertheless, still on hold, figured I might as well give it a try. Lo and behold, though I had to give the chat person more information than he should have needed to find the status – location and last name should have been plenty, not that plus phone and home address which they ALREADY HAVE – collecting it again for “security reasons” for an appliance repair is preposterous) he DID get the status eventually; ironically, I got my answer literally at the same moment as someone finally took my phone call. I hung up when they said hello. Elapsed time: 33 minutes of my precious Saturday, just to find out if my vacuum was ready to pick up. Now, I ask you: is this good customer service?

More to the point, is that really the best a struggling American corporation can do for its’ customers??? What the heck going on over there??

Surprise, surprise: The problems in system design I wrote about in the financial system meltdown are also at play with the health care system, according to David Goldhill of The Atlantic. Please read his article. No time? Just read this paragraph:

“Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.”

If you want a better system, you have to incent people in the system to naturally behave the way you want them to. Any incongruency between system-mandated behaviors and system participants’ inherent self-interest will result in an imperfect system. The more incongruent these things are, the more perverse system outcomes will be. Simple. Why can’t governments and businesses do this better?