We’ve got the Refrigerator Blues.
No, that’s not a song. We’re blue because our fridge stoppedworking. We sat down to have some ice cream last week and it was all soft.That’s when we found out about the fridge problem. The fridge was warm and notproducing any cold.
We had to throw out many of the things that spoiled in thefridge overnight.
Called a repair shop in Greeley and very nice man named Alphonsocame and looked at it and said he couldn’t work on it because that would voidour warranty. Also, he said this brand of refrigerator sometimes can’t berepaired.
We bought the fridge from a big box store in Greeley, four yearsago, and before buying, we checked on-line, and everyone said they liked theirbrand of fridge.
The big box store where we bought it does not repairrefrigerators.
So, we got our refrigerator book out and it said on it: “Yoursatisfaction is important to us. If we have not met your expectations, pleasecall us.”
That sounded good, so we called.
Not the best thing to do.
After being on hold for about an hour and listening to theirstupid music playing the same song over and over, finally a woman answered thephone.
My wife told her about our Fridge Problems, and she didn’t soundvery helpful.
For one thing, she said our warranty wasn’t good. We’ve had thefridge for four years and it has a seven-year warranty. The company woman saidthe warranty didn’t apply to a leaking refrigerant, and that’s probably what’swrong with our appliance.
Then she gave us a couple of Denver repair places to call. Noone in Greeley would repair their fridges.
Called the Denver places. One said they wouldn’t come toGreeley, mainly because the fridge company didn’t pay them sometimes and othertimes, they had to wait a long time before being paid.
But one of the repair shop people said they’d send someone inabout 10 days to look at it. Probably not fix it, but just check the fridge. Ifwe paid $125 up front.
No.
Meanwhile, we had to keep our refrigerated things outside incoolers. Afraid a dog or a bear or something worse would get in and eateverything.
So, after a few days, we went out and bought a little tinyrefrigerator just to keep a few things cold until we got the Bad Fridgerepaired.
We looked up the fridge company on line again, and there were allkinds of complaints about the company. Those weren’t there when we looked fouryears ago. Apparently, all of those early happy people also lost their fridge’scold. We also found a class action lawsuit against the company for having somany bad refrigerators.
I decided not to use the company name in this column, becausethey’d probably sue me.
There was no one to work on our fridge, and things had becomecrazy, so we went to a smaller, LOCAL store and bought a new refrigerator. Itwas Weld County Appliance, and they were very nice, didn’t argue with us and wewere happy, leaving the store smiling.
The new fridge will be installed next week.
And, we learned a lesson.
Buy locally.
