Last winter, our dehumidifier broke. We had bought it from Sears when we were living in Ticonderoga, New York, back in 2003. Now that Lisa and I were shopping local, we decided to buy a dehumidifier from a local store,. So last May we went looking for one in a local store in Cleveland, Tennessee, where we live.
Lisa has already blogged about the trip, although she didn’t mention that one of the items we were looking for was a dehumidifier. The first place we went to people call the “scratch and dent” store because some of the items they sell are new, but have minor blemishes that prevent their being sold at full price. We’d been planning to go there ever since we moved to the Cleveland area two years ago. Unfortunately, the salesman told us that the store doesn’t carry dehumidifiers.
So we went to another place, United Wholesale Outlet, that our friends told us sells appliances. We did find a dehumidifier — but it didn’t look too appealing. Its appearance gave the impression that it had been used before. It had no box or instructions. It just didn’t give us a good feel. So we decided to give it a pass.
By the end of the day, we couldn’t find any other local store that sold dehumidifiers.
So we decided to buy another Kenmore dehumidifier at the Sears store in Cleveland. We know Kenmore is a good name — even though, apparently, the the appliances are now made in China. We also were happy with the one we had. (The reason the dehumidifier broke is because I neglected to maintain it properly.)
So what’s the moral of this story for shopping local? The same one I’ve talked about before. Chain stores have become so much a part of our economy that we have to depend on them for some things. In our case, the only place we could buy a good dehumidifier was at Sears.
Tags: local store, shopping local
[...] something at a chain store because that was the only place I could get it. A good example is our buying a new dehumidifier at Sears. We tried to find a dehumidifier at an independently owned store, but none of those stores carried [...]