As best I can tell, that fridge cost you some $2,500. That isn’t cheap, and you should have a reasonable expectation that ANY appliance will be fit for its intended purpose.
This Maytag fridge wasn’t fit for its intended purpose - or at least, not all of it was. Maytag insists that it will only obey the exact letter of the law for its “valued customer.”
What is worse, this particular “valued customer” reported the problems well within the first year and a tech was called out. If the tech couldn’t (or didn’t) fix your ‘lemon’ of an appliance, it should have been replaced. At the very least, Maytag should have looked up your appliance’s history now and decided to make an exception.
This kind of thing is why I personally stopped buying any products from the Maytag/Jennair/Whirlpool conglomerate. They are cheapskates from the top down. I had three different appliances in a row conk out at just beyond the one year warranty and they refused to do a darn thing.
I don’t totally blame customer service because they can only do what they’re empowered to do—and the CEO, Mark Bitzer, makes over $18 million per year by being cheap to customers.
When I bought a Samsung refrigerator, I had a problem with ice forming on the back of the refrigerator and making the drawer stick (among other things). After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing they refunded my money IN FULL– on a 3 year old fridge. I was so impressed that I bought another Samsung, which is still in perfect shape 5 years later. I may have been lucky with Samsung and unlucky with Whirlpool, but I’m sticking with the company that actually went BEYOND what it had to do.
Maytag is coasting on the reputation it built up in the 50s. They will mouth ‘you’re a valued customer’ but they really don’t mean it.
What they are not telling you is that implied warranties also come into play under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, the federal law that governs consumer product warranties, and this is the angle you need to pursue.
“The implied warranty of merchantability is a merchant's basic promise that the goods sold will do what they are supposed to do and that there is nothing significantly wrong with them. In other words, it is an implied promise that the goods are fit to be sold. The law says that merchants make this promise automatically every time they sell a product they are in business to sell...However, the state statutes of limitations for breach of either an express or an implied warranty are generally four years from date of purchase. This means that buyers have four years in which to discover and seek a remedy for problems that were present in the product at the time it was sold. It does not mean that the product must last for four years. It means only that the product must be of normal durability, considering its nature and price.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/businesspersons-guide-federal-warranty-law