I am shocked and amazed at the truly dreadful and negligent lack of any reasonable customer service available from Costco.
We purchased a dishwasher from Costco.com which included the removal of our old dishwasher and installation of the new dishwasher.
Everything was fine with the order until the day Costco's installer showed up with our new dishwasher.
The installer did not speak any English making it impossible for me to communicate with him. This, in turn, resulted in the installer not listening to or understanding my requests to please put something down to protect our custom wood floor from damage from any water or leaking residue from the old dishwasher. One would think a Costco installer would know to do this particularly on a wood floor but this particular installer apparently did not know or bother to put anything down.
You can probably guess what happened. First, the installer damaged our kitchen cabinets with the screws he used to attach the new dishwasher. We then noticed the new dishwasher had scratches along the side of the stainless steel (so much for the brand new dishwasher not being damaged from day 1). And then to top it all off, the installer dragged the old dishwasher out of our house and left puddles of water with chemical residue all over our custom wood floor. By the time he noticed what he had done, the chemicals had seeped into our wood floor and left a visible stain from our kitchen to our front door (about 30 feet). Making matters worse, we couldn't even explain to him our concern and disappointment with how he installed the dishwasher because he didn't speak or understand English. This makes me wonder if Costco actually does anything to qualify or prescreen their approved installers. Why would they approve an installer who can't communicate on a very basic and rudimentary level with the homeowner?
We immediately contacted Costco to notify them of the damaged dishwasher, cabinet and floor. To their credit, Costco did agree to provide either a full refund or a discount off the dishwasher for the damage to the stainless steel and cabinet. Knowing we did not want to subject ourselves to another round of incompetent installers coming to our house and doing more damage, we reluctantly agreed to the discount which obviously left us with a damaged kitchen cabinet and dishwasher.
However, for the damaged floor, Costco referred us to a "liaison" who would "assist us" in determining the extent of the damage and repairing our wood floors.
The liaison instructed us to contact some flooring contractors to review the damage and assess how best to repair the damage which we promptly did. We contacted two professional flooring installers. Unfortunately, the damage was so severe that both contractors recommended we sand and refinish our entire wood floor. The type of floor we have is no longer manufactured so we could not remove and replace the individual damaged planks and nothing they used to try and remove the stains would work. Needless to say, this was not an inexpensive repair when all was said and done.
We contacted Costco to share the estimates from both flooring contractors which were virtually identical and within a few hundred dollars of each other. This is where the problems really escalated. The liaison was no longer returning our calls or helping us get resolution to resolution. Instead, we were referred to a number of different individuals both within and outside Costco (although it was difficult to determine what role each contact played) and none were offering any type of solution to our problem. After countless calls pleading with Costco, their liaison, the installer and countless others to help us repair the damage to our floor, we realized we were getting the classic runaround and Costco had no intention of taking any responsibility to resolve our situation. Each person we have contacted at Costco and elsewhere are pointing the finger at each other and no one is taking any responsibility to actually repair the damage to our floors.
I don't understand why we have to chase numerous individuals both within and outside Costco to get our problems resolved when it is THEIR APPROVED INSTALLER who did this damage to our home. Costco owns this problem and yet they are taking zero responsibility in getting it resolved.
Painful lesson learned to never buy another appliance from Costco under any circumstance. We are left with over $15K of damage to our custom wood floors and there does not appear to be anyone from Costco willing or able to help us. In all likelihood, we are going to need to retain an attorney to get some sort of remediation to this issue which really sucks when all we really wanted was to replace an old dishwasher.
Buyer beware: COSTCO DOES NOT STAND BEHIND THEIR PRODUCTS and are a nightmare when it comes to getting them to provide any sort of relief when there is a problem. I will never buy another appliance from Costco again! read more