Consumers Speak: Circuit City and PNY’s Awful RMA

Image courtesy of t resist. I picked up the PNY 6800GT video card. Well on my 2^nd day of owning the card the first contact point on the AGP bus managed to burn to a crisp. Since there is not a Circuit City anywhere near my town of Bumsville, KS I was forced to start making calls. Circuit City happily obliged that it would be much easier and quicker if I just went through PNY for my warranty. Well those assholes lied. Two months later I had myself a brand new refurbished replacement card.

Gizmodo’s own Travis writes:

I have been a deal hunter since I was in diapers. Normally 95% of my technology related purchases come from Newegg, who have a fabulous RMA service, but when I caught a deal at Circuit City online a year ago I couldn
t resist. I picked up the PNY 6800GT video card. Well on my 2^nd day of owning the card the first contact point on the AGP bus managed to burn to a crisp. Since there is not a Circuit City anywhere near my town of Bumsville, KS I was forced to start making calls. Circuit City happily obliged that it would be much easier and quicker if I just went through PNY for my warranty. Well those assholes lied. Two months later I had myself a brand new refurbished replacement card.

Here is how their phone service works: you call, guide yourself through many stupid automated lines and finally get queued for a person. An hour later if nobody has felt like taking your call, they tell you shit out of luck and call back later. I got this at least 50% of the time I called. Although, the few times that I was able finally talk to someone, it did expedite the warranty process because I was able to drill the phone representative to look up information and make calls to get me taken care of.

Two months later when I received my refurbished card I was once again angry to all hell because the warranty documentation clearly states that I would receiver a new card in exchange because it has been less than a month since my time of purchase. At that point I didn
t care anymore and kept the card because I did not want to play phone tag with PNY anymore. Then like any other angry consumer I swore to never buy from PNY again, but I am too much of a sucker for a good deal and picked up a PNY USB flash drive because it was on sale a few months later.

Since we’re always so negative around here, we’ll ask a question in reverse: What’s the best RMA experience you’ve ever had?

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