Sears

Short Version: Came here to pick-​up an online order. The store itself is nice, and while some prices are high, you can get some great clearanced prices. Employees were very friendly. Picking up an online order was insanely easy, and it was honestly pretty effortless. I’m impressed.
Long Version: I grew up with a pretty negative opinion of Sears from my parents, but I’ve stepped in here a couple times to get various things. Recently, I fell in love with a certain model of vacuum, though, but I didn’t want to pay an insane amount of money to get it. That meant shopping around.
It’s much easier to shop without wasting the gas, so I used the internet to check out prices on Target, K-​mart, Wal-​Mart, Home Depot, and so many other stores. Flipping through the Sunday paper, I saw a Sears ad and remembered that I hadn’t checked there. Turns out that Sears had the vacuum on a sale for $ 50 less than everyone else! I ordered it online through a cash back website and set it up for in-​store pick-​up the next day. I normally consider in-​store pick-​up to be a lazy way to shop, but they only had one left, and I wanted to make sure I could get it in the morning.
I went in in the morning, and it’s just Sears. One of the escalators was down for maintenance, so you had to take the elavator. I love that Sears hangs giant «Clearance» tags from the ceiling near their clearance areas. This makes it easy to find and browse various things to find the clearance. Everything is very nicely organized, and such is Sears, quite a bit of the floor space is taken up by tools, large appliances, and clothing. In fact, that’s pretty much the gist of the entire store. They also have a small fitness area, but those are the main things that Sears sells.
In terms of their regular prices, they seem a bit more expensive than a lot of the big box retail stores, but they aren’t insanely so. They’re higher, but it’s not horrible. When it comes to clearance, you can find some really great sales. Some of the fitness equipment was on sale, and it was only a couple dollars for something that used to be priced at $ 20. I think you could end up finding some really good clearance here. I ended up leaving with some cute, affordable flats and some cheap pajama pants. Win!
The employees all seemed super friendly. My mother called me right before I walked in the door, so I was on the phone almost the entire time. While there were a lot of employees standing around, all of them acknowledged me in some way while I was shopping such as a nod or a smile — even though I was on the phone. Check-​out went smoothly and the associate helping me was great. He even helped me spend my Shop My Way Rewards Points even though I couldn’t figure out my PIN.
Now to what I thought would be the difficult part: picking up my order. I’ve used in-​store pick-​up before at other retailers, and it has been an absolute disaster. At Best Buy, they couldn’t find where my order was in the system then figured out it was sent to the wrong store. At Wal-​Mart, it turns out that they had given my order to someone else on accident. I was prepared for the worst.
Turns out I had no reason to be worried. There’s a small kiosk near the entrance WITH a drive-​up area purely for this reason. You can park under the awning right next to the door in case you’re purchasing a big item for easy loading. You swipe the card you made the purchase with online, and it pulls up the order. You sit in a nearby chair, and someone will bring your order out to you. That’s it. The current Sears promise is that they’ll provide a coupon to you if someone doesn’t have you order out to you within 5 minutes. I waited less than 2. It was the easiest in-​store pick-​up I’ve ever done, and I will definitely be using it again.