After waiting 56 days for his Dell Mini 9 to ship, reader WantMyDellMini asked Dell for a little compensation, only to be told: “Dell no longer believes in compensation for the purpose of customer satisfaction.” The Mini 9’s shipping status has already changed at least ten times, but Dell claims that our poor reader has no choice but to keep waiting.

He writes:

I wanted to let you know of a situation I have with Dell and my order for a Mini 9. I needed to purchase a new computer for my wife this Christmas. Her Dell 4600 that we purchased many years ago was failing. Rather than repairing it, we decided to buy a new computer. We chose an all-in-one computer. For us, that meant an HP TouchSmart or a Dell XPS One. We went with the Dell XPS One for one reason. Dell ran a promotion where you could buy a Dell XPS One computer and get a Dell Mini 9 for $99. This was $250 off the base price of $349, but after upgrades the order was $486.16. The $250 discount incented us to purchase the Dell XPS One computer. This order was placed on 12/3/2008.

The exact configuration of my Dell Mini 9 is a Cherry Red, 1GB, 32GB SSD, 1.3MP Camera, Bluetooth, No Mobile Broadband.

We received the Dell XPS One within a week of placing the order. The Mini 9 was supposed to ship on 12/10 when we placed the order. Shortly afterwards the status of the order changed to “In Production” which changed the shipping date to 12/15. Since then, we have received “no answers” from Dell as to when we will actually receive the Dell Mini 9. The estimated shipping date has changed no less than 10 times so far. The last time was yesterday when the estimated shipping date changed to 1/27/2009 with a delivery date of 1/28/2009. That is 56 days past our order date to receive the Dell Mini 9. Originally I had asked Dell to provide some form of additional discount for customer satisfaction issues with this order. There exact statement was “Dell no longer believes in compensation for the purpose of customer satisfaction.” Since that time I have asked Dell to either provide the Mini 9 immediately or refund the $250 which incented us to buy the XPS One computer and cancel the Mini 9 order. They refused to do either. This seems perfectly acceptable to me since Dell has clearly been unable to fulfill this order. Instead, I have been told by Dell that they will never commit to a date where they will actually ship the Mini 9.

This sounds like a manager on a power trip, though we wouldn’t put it past Dell to make a boldly inane declaration that they’d eventually walk back. No compensation to satisfy customers? What else are they going to do? Try to manufacture quality merchandise?

Try to get a more reasonable answer by firing an Executive Email Carpet Bomb at Dell’s executives.

RELATED: Email Addresses For 19 Dell Executives
(Photo: The Consumerist)

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