Home, Home On the Lemon...

This actor is Jesse White, remember him? He was the Maytag spokesman for many years and, although not the intention of the commercials, whenever I saw him I had to laugh. Well, maybe not laugh actually; “snort” might be a more appropriate word. The thrust of the commercials was to convince you that Maytag products were so good that they never needed repair and poor Mr. White, the repairman, could only sit around and twiddle his thumbs. He was later replaced by Gordon Jump but the situation was unchanged.

In 1993, or so, I bought a Maytag range, a “Magic Chef” model 6498VRV. It was a good stove, not fancy, served my needs adequately and it had a “self-cleaning” feature that was a boon to my lack of interest in mucking about inside an oven. But there’s the rub. There was an electronic chip in the works of this model that would burn out when you used the self-cleaning feature and would set off an alarm of the *beep*beep*beep* variety (extremely annoying) which meant you had to shut off the stove completely and sometimes, when it was way persistent, at the power source. When this alarm went off the stove would stop working even though there was nothing wrong with the stove; the problem was within the alarm system itself. (It was an “F-1” alarm which meant nothing to me but certainly sent an alarm to Maytag.)

Anyway, four times in 13 years I had to call a repairman and, guess what, they never, ever, had the part on hand to repair it which meant, of course, that Jesse White never moved. The second time it happened it took almost six weeks for it to be fixed and jeopardized a Thanksgiving dinner. The third time was almost equally inconvenient. And the fourth time was just a couple of weeks ago…but by now I had the procedure down pat and was able to skip through the labyrinthine customer service system with confidence. However, this time something was obviously different. I had to backtrack through several levels of “service” people all the way to corporate headquarters in Indiana (I think). My particular stove model must have a major asterisk next to it now, if not claxon horns going off, because suddenly the service got close and personal.

The nutshell: that particular piece of electronic hardware is no longer being manufactured and the stove is irreparable. It was a lemon to start with and now it’s unusable pulp.

I was outraged since I had put up with this stove for a long time and was in okay-now-Corporate-Maytag-what-are-you-gonna-do-for-me, mode. It became immediately apparent; however, that I was by no means their first complainant and the script was already right on the computer screen before their eyes. Before my customer service person adhered to this obvious scenario, she made the mistake of telling me that we should never expect any appliance to last more than ten years, but then she obviously sensed the bile building in my voice and hastily made me the offer she had been directed to do. I would buy a new Maytag model of my choice and they would buy the old one back from me. Two separate transactions. It almost worked. I bought my new stove from Sears and it was delivered in a couple of days (before the old one was removed) so I had a shiny new stove sitting in my living room for a while and an unusable one in the kitchen. The glitch was that Maytag hired a local contractor who proved uncooperative initially, saying it couldn’t be done for three weeks, but somehow Corporate clout got it done and, astoundingly, when they showed up they handed me my bribe, er, my check for quite a nice sum.

Wow, this is maybe the most boring blog I’ve ever written, but what I guess I’m getting at is that those Maytag commercials seem to have disappeared, perhaps a victim to reality. They weren’t exactly wrong I guess, but being prepared and promising to make repairs isn’t the same as being able to actually get it done. If these commercials show up again let's all be prepared to snort in unison.