by HRRC Program Director Allison Urbanek.<\/p>\n
I promised a little story about the experience we had buying our first major appliance. Let me take you back just a bit. On my birthday in April, we bought a dishwasher. Since Dave does not do dishes (he cooks, and I clean), I was in quite a hurry to replace our non-functioning dishwasher with one that actually worked.<\/p>\n
So, we went looking for a dishwasher. The things we focused on were:<\/p>\n
We went to several places \u2013 a wide range of stores, small appliance stores to the large \u201cbig box\u201d chains \u2013 to see if we could find one that would meet our criteria, and each store offered its own unique experience.\u00a0 We started with the big box stores<\/b> (we went to three), where we found that the sales people were willing to take time to walk around with us, tell us about their personal experiences with certain dishwashers, share what other customers were looking for, and answer our questions. They were willing to print off information from their website about each model. When there was something you couldn\u2019t tell from the tag (i.e. what the decibel rating was, or if the dishwasher was available in the smudge-proof stainless), they didn\u2019t mind researching that information for us. Since they spent so much time with us, we asked each person if they were working on commission (so we could look for them if we came back), but they all answered \u201cno.\u201d While they would be happy to sell us the dishwasher, anyone else on the sales staff could help us.<\/p>\n
We then went to two small appliance stores<\/b> in our area (and my opinion is just based on these two specific places). At the first one we went to, no one came to help us, so we walked out pretty quickly. Next, we tried the store where we had bought our grill a few years back. The young man who had sold us the grill did not make commission on the sale, had spent plenty of time with us, and had really told us a lot about the grill, so we decided to try this store again. This time, the sales person in the appliance department was terrible! When we described our list of important items, his response was, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, you won\u2019t be able to find anything in that price range. This one has everything you\u2019re looking for, and it\u2019s a steal at $850!\u201d I then asked about the decibel range, and he answered, \u201cIt\u2019s on the tag\u2026\u201d OK, I\u2019m a reasonably observant person, but the reason I asked was because it was not<\/i> on the tag. Ultimately, he agreed that the tag didn\u2019t have the information, but instead of checking for it, he just said, \u201cAll new dishwashers are practically silent. It doesn\u2019t really matter what the rating is, they\u2019re all quiet.\u201d\u00a0 (While I realize that yes, anything would sound quieter than our previous dishwasher, which sounded like a freight train, I was looking for sound data in order to compare my purchases.) Finally, I asked about commission, and he admitted that he did work on commission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by HRRC Program Director Allison Urbanek. I promised a little story about the experience we had buying our first major appliance. Let me take you back just a bit. On my birthday in April, we bought a dishwasher. Since Dave does not do dishes (he cooks, and I clean), I was in quite a hurry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures-in-homeownership"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2648"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24059,"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2648\/revisions\/24059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrrc-ch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}