Hawkins & Sons Inc (Appliances) — Local services in Elsmere

I will attempt to be fair with this review of Hawkins and Sons but as you can see, my opinion of this local businessman is less than ideal.

I will break down my experience into numerous facets:

What we were looking for: I was in shopping to replace the entire kitchen appliances. I was having my kitchen remodeled and the appliances had to be upgrade. Having done this project a couple times before, we were looking for a single source, and local business to keep the dollars local. We did twice purchases before on the internet and returns on large items are a bit problematic. We were looking for all stainless steel, refrig, dishwasher, microwave, garbage disposal and stove.

We choose mostly KitchenAid for the brand, per Hawkins recommendations.

Pre-Sales - Fair

Sales folks at the store we nice and not overly pushy. They have been around these products for a while.

Sale/Value - Poor

We shopped the internet and their prices were not competitive, around 15-20% more than what could have been saved by sourcing to numerous online retailers. When pressed, they did cut a small discount since we were buying a large number of item together. A gesture, but nothing to compare with the other suppliers. We figured that local service would be make up for the difference.

Delivery and Installation - Poor

They did deliver on the date the stated, but service support was poor. We did not notice until later that the french style door was not perfectly aligned. So the door is a little hard to close since it's slightly off. I would have figured that the delivery guys would notice that the doors were off and resolve issue. The stove was placed in the room.

Summary and Final thoughts:

Overall, we hoped to source locally for the appliances since we would have like to develop a relationship with a local merchant. I was unimpressed and spend more than I should have for a relationship that I am not sure I would...

My recent experience with Hawkins has been terrible. After shopping at numerous places trying to find a 27" dbl wall oven, I went to Hawkins (where we purchases our suite of appliances back in 1997). The salesperson was told many times that my currect dbl ovens weren't working properly and I was hosting Christmas dinner for my family. He told me though the walls ovens were on back order, they'd be in in two weeks and it would 'NOT BE A PROBLEM' to get them installed prior to Christmas. Well, that's not true. As I said, I made it perfectly clear that if he couldn't deliver prior to Christmas, I wasn't placing the order. I didn't receive call backs when told I would and the last straw was yesterday when he told me they weren't on the truck so they'd be in Friday. I said fine, I'd make myself available for a Saturday installation. Only to be told they were closed on Saturday. I then asked him to check to see if any of his installers would like overtime. I even said why don't you go to the warehouse and pick up the ovens and then install on Friday. My ex was standing in the room and heard the entire conversation where the salesperson said he'd ask to see if either option would work and get back to me later that day. Guess what? Yep, no call. When I called this morning, he had the audacity to tell me he didn't say that. I told him I had a witness and that he most certainly did. I then asked to speak to his manager and was told okay, but he'll just tell you the same thing. We'll see if Mike does indeed call me today. If this is how Hawkins treats their customers when they are most certainly in the wrong, I don't ever want to deal with them again. This is for informational purposes and I leave you to make your...

I am very thrilled with the service and products I received here. My partner and I are very young looking, and we dress younger than we are, so sometimes "Grown Up Stores", ie appliance, lumber/supply, etc often don't treat us as serious customers. Not so at Hawkins. We were greeted the first minute we came in and the salesman, John, let me speak my needs and immediately had good questions and comments about why'd we come in (our 20 year old dryer finally died and my DIY skills were not enough to resurrect it this time, lol). Not only did they have the right dryer with the right feature set, it was also on sale. I was so blown away by how thoughtful and caring everyone was in the whole shop. I am probably going to replace my washer, fridge, and stove with them, because they gave me some great things to think about with usage and repair. How can you beat that? Icing on the cake was delivery - we went in on Thursday and the soonest they could do was Monday - totally fine, that's to be expected, they were already booked up for the weekend, I had back up plans in case we couldn't get it installed that day or the next. However....I got a call 24 hours later that they had some time and they'd love to squeeze our install in, since we didn't need much. They were right on the money - showed up 15 mins after phone call, install was done in under 20. I'm pleased as punch and I wanted everyone to know what a great, great experience it was. If you're not buying here and you're not buying local, I urge you to check them out - they'll work with you to find what you need, and they won't upsell you stuff you don't want....