Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - Wasted Day at Miracle Ear

For some time now, we’ve known we’ve had to get Hubby some hearing aids. He’s had them before, but they were never adequate, and with some big jobs coming up, we felt it was really time to get on top of it. We needed to get them from someplace national so they could be adjusted anywhere, rather than from a regular audiologist, which we wouldn’t keep coming back to. So we decided to go to Miracle Ear, who had an outlet in a Sears store about 15 miles away. After a good night’s sleep (though not long enough!), we headed out to Finger Lakes Mall, which was mostly like a ghost town. We stopped for ice cream first, then went in for our afternoon appointment. We walked in prepared to pay whatever we needed to get the job done, and the woman there gave Hubby the usual tests, then pulled out a book of models and one demo of one kind of hearing aid, but not the kind Hubby really wanted. We asked to see one of those, and she told us she didn’t have any other demo models. Well, we started asking more questions, and she started getting really vague on us, until finally she had the audacity to respond, "You don’t need to know that, that’s for me to know." Needless to say, that answered didn’t set well with either one of us, but it went from bad to worse. When I asked the difference between two similar models, she replied, "The features." When I asked which features, she had no other answer, just "The features," but she couldn’t tell me which features. Then she finally got on the phone and asked someone else, with the preface, "I have a client whose wife wants to know this," in a tone of voice that made it clear she was losing patience with me. Tough. Finally, after three hours of gradually deteriorating answers, we finally said we weren’t about to shell out $6000 for something we couldn’t even see and that couldn’t be explained to us, and that was that. What a waste!! We walked in ready to buy and the saleswoman managed, over time, to talk us right out of it with her incompetence. Tiresome, pointless exercise. So many other, better ways we could have spent our day! Headed back to the ranch exhausted, but we still did a few simple things to pack up in preparation for our departure tomorrow.