Great news and terrible news for reader Mark, who can’t get Westinghouse Digital to repair his TV that broke after only three months. Heck, they won’t even pick up the phone. The great news is that another reader wrote in to tell us how he successfully got his Westinghouse TV first repaired, then replaced. The terrible news is that he accomplished this by buying the TV at Costco.

Mark, as you may recall, got a great deal on the TV by getting it at the Target where his wife works, using a Target debit card. This rules out Costco awesomeness as well as any additional warranty protection that his credit card might have offered. Scott offers one possible way for Mark to get some actual customer service out of Westinghouse Digital…if he had a time machine and a Costco card.

I bought a Westinghouse Digital TV from Costco and I started having problems within a few months. There was a known problem with HDMI inputs on this particular TV that caused most of my HDMI hardware to not be recognized by the TV.

After considerable back-and-forth with Westinghouse through Costco’s Concierge service, they agreed to have a repairman come out. The repairman came out and replaced the TV’s main board, but the TV still had problems with HDMI devices. Again it took considerable back-and-forth with Westinghouse through Costco (most of the time nobody at Westinghouse answered the phone when Costco’s representative called them), they agreed to replace the TV with a refurbished model.

The refurbished model had the same problems with HDMI that Westinghouse, to this day, continues to not acknowledge. And now my out-of-warranty LCD TV has a burn-in problem. I would definitely recommend everyone stay away from Westinghouse Digital TV’s.

Westinghouse, as you may recall, was one of the great companies that turned the 20th century into the American Century. Fittingly, it went out of business in 1999. Officially. Sort of. What’s left of the company leases the venerable Westinghouse name, one that was probably on your grandparents’ kitchen appliances and maybe their first television, to a company that makes flatscreen TVs.

A venerable but extinct icon of American manufacturing licenses its name to an outfit that makes TVs in China and won’t pick up the phone and honor their own warranties? Yeah, that sounds about right.

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My TV Breaks After 3 Weeks, Westinghouse Digital Really Doesn’t Care

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