Holiday weekends are for getting together with family and friends, to relax and enjoy an afternoon barbeque. These get togethers are more meaningful after the isolation that came with the pandemic, especially because we can visit outdoors. Retailers also take advantage of these holiday weekends … so we're not surprised to see lots of advertising for Memorial Day appliance sales.
But wait, that's not all you need to consider right now …
CNBC's article, What retail inventory misses and markdowns signal about the market’s fight against inflation, reported this week that the big box stores misjudged consumers demand for home products. With consumers focused on getting out of the house, these retailers are sitting with too much high priced inventory – appliances, outdoor furniture and more. This is creating big Memorial Day appliance sales but you still want to buy smart!
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Don't Assume Memorial Day Appliance Sales Offer the Best Prices
The Internet is an amazing tool that helps those who want to save money … but you've got to use it, or you will pay more. My friend Maria was juggling selling her condo and buying a house, so she didn't have lots of time. She focused on her budget and what features she could afford, skipping the water and ice dispenser in the refrigerator door for more expensive ovens … which are more important to an “Italian cook”.
Maria thought she'd gotten the best deal from Home Depot (click for invoice), with their President's Day 20% sale on appliances. She didn't have a lot of time to shop because the movers were coming Tuesday and the closing on the condo being sold was Wednesday. I convinced her we needed to visit Spencers (click for invoice) and went with her (that's me below). Maria was thrilled when she saved more than $1,500 and got an upgraded dishwasher.
Read Buying Appliances: When & Where, to get my best tips on buying appliances (and I'm currently using these same tips to buy a new car in this crazy supply chain world).
Picking Appliances – Size & Features
When you're buying one appliance, you have time to research and discover the features most important to you. When you're buying appliances for a new house, it can be overwhelming. That's when you need to prioritize your time:
- Identify which appliance is most important to you, so you know where to invest your time. For me this is always the refrigerator because I work at home and make an embarrassing number of trips to the kitchen, mostly for drinks and always for ice.
- For the other appliances, pick one or two things that are most important to streamline your research. For example, here re my priorities:
- Stove – easy to clean and not sure the glass tops achieve this.
- Microwave – amount of space inside, as the builder microwave had the same outside dimensions but it felt like half the room inside.
- Dishwasher – quiet when run vs the sound of a train running through my kitchen with the uninsulated (yes, it makes a huge difference) crap provided by my builder.
- Washer and dryer – easy to load/unload, easy to clean out the lint trap and now that I've experienced the weeping Samsung units leaving puddles on the floor, I'll stick to the old fashion top loading units in the future.
Appliances should last 10 or more years when they're built right, installed correctly and use for what they're meant to do. With that in mind, here are some articles written after I bought a new refrigerator … and most of the ideas will work equally well for other appliances.
- Researching Refrigerator Brands, Styles & More
- Refrigerator Styles & Buying a Refrigerator
- Refrigerator Sizes: What They Really Tell You
- 5 Tips for Buying a Refrigerator
- … and if you're going to install you're new refrigerator, 3 Lessons Learned from a Bad Refrigerator Install.
Check Appliance Energy Efficiency
Please, please, please check to make sure the appliances you're buying meet EnergyStar criteria. Why am I stressing this? While building my house, I thought it would be smart to buy the appliances during the Thanksgiving Day sales … and lined everything up from one of the big box stores.
Then I started to check each appliance for their EnergyStar rating and found two of the appliances weren't EnergyStar qualified. Why? I suspect it's because they were left over units that the store wanted to get rid of before new appliances arrived, a common practice.
In fact, the Energystar.com website is a great resource (what you'll find shown above) to help you find your new appliances.
- Refrigerators – and please don't move your old refrigerator to the garage as it will use too much energy. Use a freezer to store food, while saving money and energy.
- Dishwashers
- Clothes Washers
- Clothes Dryers
- Microwaves – don't have EnergyStar ratings. Smaller microwaves are more energy efficient so don't buy one that's bigger than your family needs.
When You Need Financing …
In normal times, you could expect to pay interest when financing expensive appliances. That's why it's surprising to see zero interest financing right now … even though interest rates for mortgages are rising.
The important message here is don't assume only the big box stores can offer these financing deals. Smaller appliance stores can also offer financing and when I called Spencer's Appliances in Arizona, they confirmed they're currently offering zero financing over 18 months.
Appliance Repair History is Key to Picking a Reliable Appliance Brand
There are many different groups that evaluate appliances for customer satisfaction. To get the best perspective you should review at least 3 different reports as they often conflict with each other. In this case, I believe Consumer Reports is correct as they've ranked Samsung in position 20 out of 20 manufacturers (review full list here). The Consumer Reports ranking is based on “survey data collected from members on more than 760,000 kitchen and laundry appliances purchased new between 2010 and 2020.”
This ranking is in stark conflict with JD Power ranking Samsung the top manufacturer for 9 kitchen and laundry appliances … and Best Buy the top appliance retailer. Unfortunately I couldn't find a description of how JD Power rates appliances. Here are the only acceptable ways I trust to evaluate appliances:
- Appliances are acquired and run through rigorous testing like that done by Consumer Reports, although they also survey members. Reviewed.com also does testing and Samsung didn't fare well here.
- Surveys of a significant number of homeowners (Consumer Reports 760,000 members) can also provide trustworthy feedback.
- Appliance companies that service thousands of units annually, and have a good understanding of which units you can/cannot trust. That's why I prefer buying from stores specializing in appliances, ones that sell and service appliances. Yale Appliance is a good example, with 35 service technicians who handle more than 40,000 service calls in a year.
Five years later, I foolishly trusted an appliance store in Orlando ... and now know I will never buy another Samsung appliance!{/quote]
Memorial Day Appliance Sales & Who Will Provide Service?
Buying 6 appliances for a new house is challenging, especially when you've just moved to a new state and don't have a network of friends to ask for advice. The kitchen designer at ProSource in Orlando was extremely helpful (read: Replacing Cheap Kitchen Cabinets), so I went with her recommendation for a local appliance store.
It was easy to check the EnergyStar recommendations but oops, I didn't do a thorough review on repair issues ... as building a house doesn't leave much free time. The salesman seemed confident about Samsung and promised a three year warranty, so I went with it and will forever regret the decision.
I'll leave the repair history (3rd ice maker now broken; dishwasher repair created leak under my kitchen sink) to another article, and focus here on how to find a reliable appliance service company.
- Buy your appliances from a large, regional company that sells and services what they sell and here's why:
- Larger stores have the sales volume (Spencer's has 10 locations) needed to get support from manufacturers.
- Service means they know what brands and models have problems, so they can stop selling them until the problems are resolved. That's what Spencer's did when they stopped selling Samsung appliances.
- Local stores rely on word-of-mouth to generate new sales, making them very sensitive to your "customer experience". As a consumer you really don't have any clout with a brand like Samsung, or a retailer like Lowe's ... but you do with an appliance store like Spencer's or Yale Appliance.
If only every large metropolitan area had a Spencer's or Yale, life would be easier. Yale's first-hand analysis of brands is amazing. They "calculate appliance reliability by dividing the products we serviced by the products we sold. For this article, we looked at the number of appliances sold and serviced from December 1, 2020, to October 31, 2021." The results confirm you don't want to buy a Samsung appliance!
Note: I have a call into Yale Appliances to see if they sell Samsung appliances. Searching their website, it doesn't look like they do but I want to confirm this. Yale DOES NOT sell Samsung appliances, similar to Spencer's position when I bought my refrigerator!
Please share (scroll down) your experience and advice about kitchen and laundry appliances. Have you purchased an appliance as a result of advertising for Memorial Day appliance sales ... or any other holiday sale? Have you had challenges getting your appliances fixed during or after warranty?
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