I've bought a lot of stuff from Comet over the years. Not that their stuff is any different from anybody else's but their salespeople are knowledgeable and they offer an excellent home repair service, if you take out an extended warranty with them.
The Comet engineer came to fix my telly at lunchtime. Took him no more than 15 minutes. He was pleasant, efficient and knew his stuff. As he was leaving, he said the home service would be finishing at the end of August.
Comet has been bought over by a company called Capita which is stripping out all the services that cost money, including home repairs. In future, my telly will have to be packed up (by me), handed to a courier and sent off to a workshop down south. If what happened with my computer is anything to go by when it went back to Acer, it'll take up to 3 weeks to get it back and they won't have fixed it.
More than that, 500 engineers are being made redundant across the UK. These are mainly older guys, apprentice-served tradesmen, well-trained and good with customers. My guy has been with the company for 29 years. So far, he's had one interview, with Asda for a general handyman job - 20 hours at 6.18 an hour - and he doesn't think he's got it because nobody has phoned him back.
Desperate times. But I suppose the Comet shareholders will be happy.
Terrible news (and treatment) Jean.
ReplyDelete