(FORTUNE Magazine) – Price Waterhouse turnaround specialist R. Carter Pate has taken on an assignment in a business that is, he says, "tougher than a woodpecker's beak": appliance retailing. With national behemoths like Sears and Circuit City out there pushing washers, dryers, and TVs at cut-rate prices, Pate is trying to bring Sun Television & Appliances, a money-losing regional chain based in Ohio, out of the red. "I sat through a hundred hours of focus groups," says Pate, "where people were asked, 'Why do you choose one store over another?' In appliances, or any commodity, it's always the same answer: price."

So Pate took the usual appliance-store guarantee one giant step further. Lots of places say that they'll refund the difference between their price and someone else's, but only if you, the customer, will do the homework: Pore over everybody's ads, compare the prices, go to the store, deal with a surly salesclerk.... Right.

What Sun does is hire an outside marketing firm to do daily computerized price checks on all comparable merchandise. If somebody beats Sun's price within 30 days of any customer's purchase, that customer automatically gets a check in the mail, along with a letter from the store that says something like, hey, we noticed that two weeks ago you bought a Sony Trinitron in our store for $3.12 more than Sears' price that week, and here's the difference. The customer doesn't lift a finger.

And what do customers think? A man in Cincinnati who got a surprise $97 refund check on a television has sent slews of word-of-mouth referrals. The average refund is only about $3.90 (clearly, Sun's prices really aren't so far off what Sears is charging), but it is the thought that counts. "No matter what you're doing, you have to constantly say, What can we do that is really better? What do people not expect?" opines Carter Pate. "Then do it."

--Anne Fisher