Judy C.
Yelp
Sigh. I have bought a number of kitchen appliances from Yale, and I've always thought of them as a highly reliable, customer focused company. They've also serviced those appliances, and it's always been great. Maybe yesterday was a blip with a poor salesperson? I'm not sure. I can say that I left offended and disappointed, questioning whether I want to go back to Yale in the future.
Backstory: Our vent hood died yesterday (the thing over your stove that removes smoke etc when you are cooking), and we visited Yale to look at replacement options. Given our prior positive experiences, I would have 100% bought something from them if we found options that worked for us. Having done just a bit of internet searching beforehand, I saw that there are a range of possible hoods that fit our needs from different companies. Our former hood was a Thermador and while they no longer make the size we require, a number of other companies do. After walking in, we were assigned to work with someone named Rhonda as our salesperson. She spent the majority of time with us making assumptions without asking about our interests and needs. According to Rhonda, we don't look like people who are serious cooks - she stated this without prompting, so perhaps that is why she was bent on convincing us that we should not to get the Wolf hood, which was literally the only one they carried in the size and specifications we needed. I don't disagree that spending more on a vent hood isn't ideal, and the Wolf was indeed expensive, but I was flummoxed that she didn't ask us whether that price range was acceptable to us. (She did give us a quote to take with us in the end).
She also spent considerable time convincing us that our standard size hood (42 wide x 18 long x 24 deep) with standard vent hole out the back was not at all common and hard to find in general, and tried to convince us to go with a smaller size that was 36 inches. Maybe that's what they carried? I'm not sure. But, she didn't share that generally speaking it's recommended to have your hood somewhat larger than your range not just for aesthetics, but also for removal of smoke etc. (It's ideally supposed to be 6 inches wider, which explains why our older one is exactly 6 inches wider than our 36 inch range top).
I also asked her to also show me range tops, because ours is also very old (purchased at the same time as the vent hood that just died) and we need to consider buying one in the nearish future. She just walked me over to them and just waved her hand at the stove tops saying "this is a Thermador, this is a Wolf..." for about 1 minute, with no attempt to explain their differences beyond 1 quip or to discover what our interests and needs might be to decide what to replace our original one with (it's also a Thermador).
All told, this was not a great experience.