On my birthday, I drove from one store to another in the boston area trying to find a dell mini 9 netbook. I eventually did, the last one they had, which was an open box return, mid wipe. I purchased it @ full price, and even had to sign something saying I was OK with it not having the OS/Drivers installed.
I was fine with this, I was planning on installing ubuntu on it anyway. The problem was that w/in a few days the “p” and “o” keys had gone dead. No problem, I think, I’ll just take it back. I had left the box at my GF’s house, so I asked her to ship it to my apartment. Once I got home to california, and gotten the box, I took it back to my closest best buy in el segundo, ca. and they refused to do an exchange. An exchange. I don’t want my money back, or anything fancy – they keys don’t work, I just wanted to swap it out, no data transfer even, I wiped it for them. I cajoled, I bargained, I tried to explain what an example of bad customer service this was, but to no avail. The manager wouldn’t even come out to see me. ( !! )
In the last year I have purchased (off the top of my head):
- a laptop (alum. macbook)
- several mice
- multiple laptop cases
- two network routers
- several video adaptors
- a printer
- two 160g usb hd drives
- 1 terrabyte usb hard drive
- several video games
- ethernet cables out the wazoo
- a gigabit switch
- a non-gigabit switch
- extended power strips
I’m not going to enumerate everything I’ve purchased, but I buy a *lot* of computer equiptment. I can’t imagine why bestbuy would have a policy in place that would be so strict that it would willingly loose a customer over an *exchange* – I mean, this is exactly the type of service that drove compusa out of business. I spent a bunch of money, value me as a customer. If anyone from bestbuy reads this, this is the resolution I would like: contact the bestbuy in el segundo, and ask them to exchange my netbook. That’s it. Like for like. Otherwise, there’s a fry’s electronics a block away, and I’m sure they’d be happy to take my money.
-Nick Bernstein.
Nice. We purchased our first HDTV from them. On the day of the delivery the “guys from the warehouse” refused to deliver the TV to us after stopping the truck roughly 500 feet because our flat, straight gravel road had about an 8th of an inch of snow on it and they were sure they’d slide off the road. I told them I’d drive to the paved section and meet them to get the TV. The agreed. Then, before a minute passed, they were seen driving away, refusing to answer their cell phone as we repeatedly called them to make them stop.
No super bowl in HD that year.
We went to the Best Buy we bought it from and told ’em where they could put the TV and got our money back, went to Costco, got a nice HDTV and hauled it home in my Jeep.