This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Antonio Cangiano.
Original Post: The Ugly Truth about Best Buy Refunds
Feed Title: Zen and the Art of Ruby Programming
Feed URL: http://programmingzen.com/category/ruby/feed/
Feed Description: Antonio Cangiano's blog about Ruby development.
Best Buy sucks and you shouldn’t shop there. This post starts out personal but gets to the interesting part very quickly, so please read on.
Today is my wife’s birthday. Being a good husband I decided to come up with a nice surprise. She was probably expecting something along the lines of a case/skin for her iPod Nano. In reality, I wanted to surprise her with a nice laptop. As you may remember from my previous posts, I bought a MacBook Pro for myself just a few weeks ago, so I wasn’t going to go crazy in terms of my budget. But I thought that an affordable laptop for browsing and writing would be an unexpected and very welcomed gift. What I didn’t know was that Best Buy was going to hijack my plans.
I bought an economical yet decently powerful Acer Aspire 5100 (15.4” CrystalBrite TFT LCD Display, AMD Turion 64 Mobile 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB 5400rpm) on Friday afternoon from the Best Buy at the Markville Mall in Markham, Ontario. I brought it home that night, checked that it was OK, booted it up, installed the OS and surfed for a while. Everything was all right, so I carefully stored it in a safe place for a couple of days. At this point my wife didn’t know anything about the laptop. Yesterday night while she was sleeping I started to set it up so that it would be ready for today’s birthday. I installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, etc… I started to use the laptop and it seemed all good, but after an hour or so I noticed that the light on the screen was uneven and it seemed a bit too flickery for my taste. I shut it down for 5 minutes, and then booted it up again. The problem appeared to be solved. Resolved or not, this left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I left it idle on my desk, while the screen saver was running and I started reading a research paper on Haskell.
I didn’t even finish the paper, and my eye met the new laptopâs screen. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The screen had developed a black patch, typical of when crystal liquid leaks, at the top of a huge internal V shaped crack and many colored lines all over the place. I think my heart stopped for a second. Needless to say the laptop was on my desk, untouched the whole time and it was treated like a newborn baby. The external glossy glass was perfectly intact and didnât have a single scratch or impact point. It didn’t even have a fingerprint on it, as I was very careful not to touch it (I wanted to present it as a gift, and as such I didnât want it to have any signs of usage). I moved the mouse pointer, hoping with all my being that this was some kind of joke cooked up by a screen saver programmer, but obviously such was not the case. The Acer CrystalBrite TFT had just crashed in front of me.
I googled the problem a little and found some other people who related similar problems, and in every case they reported being told that “it’s not covered under warranty” by Acer. OK, I told myself, let’s not freak out, I’m going to Best Buy tomorrow morning and I’ll ask them to exchange the defective unit. I thought to myself, I’ll give the new unit to my wife as a gift, and I’ll setup stuff later on for her.
What Best Buy wants you to believe is that they easily exchange defective merchandise -no questions asked – within 14 days (or 30 days in some cases). The reality however is very different and leads me to conclude that Best Buy does indeed suck.
I bought this laptop two business days ago, and yet despite this, they told me immediately that they were not going to exchange it or give me a refund. ”It’s customer abuse”, a clerk named Mohammed told me and there is no way that Acer or Best Buy is going to replace it. I argued with them for at least an hour and spoke with a bunch of people including Alex and George (a manager) at the Markville Mall Best Buy. I got nowhere!
They didn’t care. Let me rephrase that, they don’t give a shit that you just spent almost a thousand dollars on something that is defective. They don’t care that it’s obvious that there is no abuse whatsoever but rather that it’s a defective LCD which overheated or leaked on its own. They basically blamed me – the customer – for the problem and when I told them that Iâve worked with computers for many years and I know what I am saying, challenging them technically, they told me “we are not saying that you broke it”, but that doesn’t matter because they still told me that they were not going to replace it or fix it. Then I asked them, what if the unit was like this out of the box? They would still not replace it in such instances. So at that point I got quite upset at them and told them politely but firmly that their customer service was horrible and that they are deceiving their customers (there was a civil action lawsuit against them in the States for similar practices and situations). I bought from Best Buy because the price was right and because I though that if I were to run into trouble, I would be able to easily replace or get the unit fixed.
Best Buy claims “Easy Returns” but it turns out that their actual policy is to try in any way to blame the customer for defected products, in order not to have to exchange or refund the defective units. While I was standing in there, there was a guy who was literally harassed by one of the clerks (Shane?) because he bought a defective GPS unit and the clerk was like (paraphrasing) “tell me the truth, you dropped it, didn’t you?”.
I was in shock over this scam operation. The guy was luckier than I was, probably because the cost of that GPS was rather minimal, so they eventually gave him a refund after a little bit of a struggle on his part.
So let me get this straight, if Best Buy is not able to prove or reasonably show any factor that would indicate that I did anything wrong, they will still condemn me for the manufactureâs defect, by not replacing a defective computer that cost me $800. It’s like the Patriot Act of consumer warranties.
After struggling for a long time while standing in their customer service area, I was finally able to convince one of the managers to have the notebook inspected at the Best Buy depot where they will evaluate whether or not the customer is guilty of misuse. Guess what, they already made it clear that my chances of getting it replaced or fixed for free, are extremely slim. And guess what else, they are going to give me a call about this in 3 weeks. Yes, the birthday was today, goodbye surprise.
In 3 or more weeks someone from Best Buy is going to give me a call and it’s pretty much guaranteed that they are going to tell me that it’s my fault and that I should suck it up. They will most likely tell me that I can get it fixed by them for hundreds of dollars or collect it in its still broken state from the store. So after a minimum of three weeks time and no further ahead that I am today, I will end up contacting Acer, whoâll probably take the laptop for another month or so before telling me that I’ve to pay X amount of dollars to get it fixed, because they don’t cover problems like this. I will get my laptop back in 2 to 3 months time if I’m lucky, itâll still be broken and Iâll have to decide if a third party provider could replace the screen for me for a reasonable amount (around $400 according to a quick Google search).
If I donât get a replacement after the initial three weeks, Iâm going to forward a complaint to both Consumer Affairs and the Better Business Bureau.
What Best Buy doesn’t understand is that Internet has a lot of power. Guess what Best Buy, you ruined my wife’s birthday and youâre most likely to going to end up ripping me off for $800, but this is going to cost you much more money than that in the end*.
Because I bet many readers won’t consider buying their next laptop from you after reading this “horror story”. Best Buy sucks and they deceive their customers. Do yourself a favor and shop elsewhere (Dell may be a good alternative).
On a side note, it may be just a rare defective unit, so at this point I don’t feel like saying “Acer sucks”, but please be warned about their possible QA issues and the fact that they won’t fix the laptop for free, if something similar happens to you.
How can you help
If you feel that this is unfair and wish to do something about it, you can contribute in several ways. Firstly, you can leverage the power of the social Web by promoting this story on sites like Reddit and Digg. You can spread the word then with your family, friends and colleagues. Link to this page or send a link to your contacts, and feel free to contact Best Buy to let them know what you think about this.
The Best Buy Rip-off Counter
Please send me an email at worstbuy @ antoniocangiano.com, indicating whether you were going to buy something from Best Buy in the near future but have now decided against doing so because of this story. Please be honest about this. If you can please specify the amount of money and the item that you were going to purchase.
If enough emails arrive regarding this, Iâm going to create a counter on this site, which will show Best Buy management how much money they lost because of their stupidity and inability to provide fair customer care to a person, who up until now, would have spent thousands of dollars every year at their stores.
Just because you had this one bad incident with Best Buy doesn't mean they suck. You said something about installing an OS? As far as I know any laptop you buy from BB OS is already installed since they have nothing but pre-manufactured laptops/desktops. They do have a 14 day policy on laptops and if any defects are found they deem credible they will refund or exchange the unit without charging you a restocking fee, did the associates who sell you the computer not offer to have your computer get a functionality check? I'm not sure how it is in Canada, maybe its a bit different but over here in the states they have Geek Squad who does a full functinality check where they check every computer free of charge takes them about 1-2 hours tops depending on how busy they are and make sure theres no defects right out of the box and pack it up and have the computer ready.
I think it depends on what Best Buy store you go to. My parents bought an HP laptop for my birthday. I turned it on and then I closed the lid and shut off. I tried to turn it on but it wouldnt work at all after that. My mom and I went to Best Buy to return it. They said there were no cases reported of any problems from this laptop but they were really nice and replaced it with another.
I have nothing aginst them myself but I do shop their often in responce to this I will find somewhere else for a few months. I alone wont break their bank but if anyone else can handle buying somwhere else I say lets do it!
I already hated Best Buy before I read your post. I refuse to shop there because their customer service is awful, but I have never had problems on your scale. I always shop at Circuit City, even if I have to pay a little extra. I don't know if you have those in Canada or not, but I find that their sales staff actually knows what they're talking about and they are really friendly and helpful.
I agree that Best Buy is a pretty worthless company. I have had a pretty bad time getting them to fix a laptop that was covered with the 3 year service plan. That and they don't train any of their employees to actually know what they are talking about. For example, I had issues connecting to the internet (ended up being a hardware problem) and their solution was to just turn off the firewall, on Windows no less.
When the hard drive crashed on my computer they were very nice and replaced it for me in about an hour. Not bad but it takes about 5 minutes to change a hard drive in a laptop if you also have to take the new drive out of the packaging first. Oh well, no problem. I get the computer back home, boot it up and reinstall the OS. Part way through putting just the stuff that I had on the computer before the HD swap it prompts me to insert a new disk. I haven't even installed any programs onto the computer yet and the drive is already full. I go and check the HD size and it's 20gb smaller than what I had. No one mentioned anything to me about this at any point until I returned to the store and demanded they fix it. It got fixed (after a 2 week trip to the factory) but that no one asked me if a 20gb smaller drive was ok is unacceptable.
The other event involved 3 more 2 week trips to the factory. The computer would be with me for less than a day before something else wasn't working. Near as I can tell they don't actually check anything on the computer to ensure that it is working before returning it to the customer.
Also, I don't use Circuit City because they laid off or reduced the pay of 4000 employees that were being payed over market standard for their position a few years back to "keep costs to the customer down". The way I see it you can achieve the same goal by firing the top 3 guys in the company who make 400 times what the average worker makes and then you still have people that have worked hard and know what they are talking about serving the actual customers.
Previous Topic
