Delivery damaged your floor. This is a different fight — here's who actually owes it.

Who actually pays — the three names in the maze

• The store sold you the appliance and the delivery. Its name is on your receipt and its claims process is the front door.
• The delivery/install contractor — usually a third-party company, not store employees — did the physical work and carries its own liability.
• The outside claims administrator — stores route home-damage claims to claims firms (in one widely documented case, a manufacturer's claims went to Sedgwick after a defective dishwasher caused roughly $18,000 in floor damage). Being "transferred to the claims administrator" is the maze working as designed.

Your job is to stop being bounced: one written claim, one claim number, every party named. A widely taught case, Len v. Home Depot, is exactly this fight — a botched install that flooded a home, fought as a negligence claim. Outcomes turn on negligence and local facts; what you control is the evidence and the speed.

The first 48 hours — the protocol

1. Photograph everything before anything is cleaned, moved, or repaired: the damage, the appliance in place, the hookups, the path the crew took through the house.
2. Find your delivery paperwork. Anything you noted on the delivery slip when you signed is the strongest sentence in the file. If damage was visible at delivery and you signed without noting it, say so honestly — timestamps and photos still carry weight — and never backfill a note you didn't make.
3. Report in writing within 48 hours even though the formal 48-hour wall governs damage to the appliance: a dated written report to the store (email creates the record) naming the delivery date, the crew, and the damage.
4. Ask, in writing: who administers delivery-damage claims for this delivery, and what is my claim number?
5. Price it: a written estimate from a flooring or remediation contractor turns "serious damage" into a claim amount.

Honest limits, stated up front

No honest site can promise this outcome — liability fights turn on who was negligent and what the paper shows, and big damage (floors, flooding, structural harm) is attorney territory. What wins the winnable ones is boring: dated photos, the signed slip, a written claim inside days, a priced estimate, and a claim number you refuse to lose. That is exactly what the kit's evidence pack assembles. For appliance damage (not home damage), the store's own clock rules — see the per-store pages.