It’s one thing to repeatedly push extended warranties on customers. We’re not fans of this particular revenue-drivng tactic (or of most extended warranties in general) but there’s nothing fundamentally dishonest about it. What is dishonest is what David says that an employee at a midwestern Target store did. While selling him an iPod Touch, the employee told David that Target’s extended warranty covers accidental damage. It doesn’t.

We visited the Target in [redacted] to buy my 12 year old daughter an Ipod Touch for her birthday, we explained this to the associate during the interaction and he told us, you should get the warranty in case she drops it or it breaks.

Fast forward 6 months, she drops it. I call to make a claim on the warranty and was told that the warranty didn’t cover physical damage. We were told by the associate that it DID. The warranty people told us to call the store.

So I call the store and talk to the store manager and he said that he couldn’t do anything about it because it was outside the return policy. I explained to him what the associate had told us and that if it did not cover accidental or physical damage we would not have bought the warranty. He said “Sorry, I cannot help you”, and hung up the phone.

I called Target’s Corporate Customer Service number and was offered my money back ($30) for the warranty. I told them that I didn’t want my money back and I want them to back up the warranty that was sold to me.

Neither the Store Manager OR the Corporate Office would address the issue of how we were lied to by the associate. The message I took away is that this company allows associates to lie to get the sale and once they have your money, they could care less about their customers. I have no choice now but to not do business with this company.

Lying about a sales transaction is a two-way street, unfortunately. There are a lot of bad consumers out there who would make something like this up in order to try to scam Target out of a new iPod, which makes managers understandably cynical. It’s possible that the associate was misinformed or poorly trained. It’s just as possible that there was a warranty-selling contest on, and this person was determined to win.

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