A Half-Century of Loyalty, Wasted
-- or, How to Destroy a Family Business in One Generation
We have lived in Plano since 1973. Three houses. Fifty-three years. Every time an appliance died, we drove to Rodenbaugh's in Allen. We never price-shopped. We never needed to. Their service was worth every penny of the premium they charged, and we paid it without complaint -- because that's what you do for a local business that earns your trust.
I'm using past tense deliberately.
What follows is both a complaint and a public service announcement for every neighbor within earshot.
Our Speed Queen dryer broke. It is under warranty. Rodenbaugh's referred us to their recommended warranty service provider: Texas True Appliance out of McKinney. That recommendation alone should disqualify Rodenbaugh's from ever using the phrase "customer service" again.
Texas True Appliance has sent a technician to our home no fewer than four times over the past month. What they have not sent is a competent one. Each visit produced a new variation on incompetence: wrong parts ordered, repairs left incomplete, components broken on the way out the door. I'll be charitable and assume they're doing their best. Their best, however, appears to be calibrated somewhere between "watched a YouTube tutorial once" and "figured it out as they went." A clothes dryer -- and I want to be very clear about this -- is not complicated machinery. It has a heater, a fan, and a motor that turns a drum. Four weeks. Still broken. Nobody at either company seems to have noticed, or cared.
The last visit ended with the technician satisfied that he felt warm air. It was Friday. Time to go home. So he left -- with the exhaust hose still disconnected.
Let me describe what happened next. A man approaching eighty years old, with a fused back, and his eighty-one-year-old wife had to manhandle a full-sized dryer around their utility room to reattach the exhaust hose themselves -- because the professional paid to fix it couldn't be bothered. When they finally got it positioned and turned it on for a systems check, the master control knob spun freely, detent-free, and utterly broken. He'd either left it that way or made it that way. Either possibility is remarkable.
For the fourth consecutive week, two elderly people are hauling wet laundry to a laundromat.
Now -- who's responsible? Speed Queen is certainly complicit. They contract with Texas True Appliance and presumably set some standard for who represents their brand in the field. That standard, if it exists, is not being met. But Speed Queen got their product sale and TTA gets paid regardless of outcome, so the incentive structure there is what it is.
Rodenbaugh's is a different matter. Rodenbaugh's got $1,800 from a customer who spent fifty years never once checking whether someone else was cheaper. I paid their premium to support a local independent. I trusted their recommendation without question. That recommendation has cost me a month of broken equipment, a damaged appliance, and physical labor my wife and I have no business performing.
And Rodenbaugh's response to all of it? Nothing. Not a phone call. Not an offer to intervene with their own referral. Not so much as an acknowledgment that the situation exists. They cashed the check and apparently consider their obligation discharged.
My wife and I ran our own business before retirement. We understand, viscerally, what repeat customers mean to an independent operation. They are not just revenue -- they are survival. Lose enough of them, and the math becomes very simple very quickly.
Gary and Ronald Rodenbaugh are listed as the third generation of a family business their grandfather built. I genuinely hope I'm wrong about what I'm about to say, but the evidence does not encourage optimism: at the rate they're burning the goodwill their predecessors spent decades accumulating, the third generation may well be the last.
Rodenbaugh's has done absolutely nothing to resolve this situation. They have left every burden on the customer -- which is precisely backwards for a business that depends on community loyalty to survive.
We will not be back. And I intend to be considerably more specific about why whenever anyone in this community asks me where to buy an appliance.
Gary and Ronald, you've been warned.
Joseph P Dougan read more