The state of California has pretty good consumer protections, but not when it comes to extended warranties. That’s what a family who bought a laptop computer at Fry’s learned after a planned five-week repair of an HP laptop ended up taking three months. Three months?

That’s more than 8% of the entire warranty period that Fry’s held on to the computer. What on earth happened? Well, HP. Once the consumer warriors of CBS Sacramento got involved, the company admitted that they had held on to the laptop for all those months because they didn’t know how to fix it. They sent it to HP…who didn’t fix it, either.

When the mother in this family inquired about the repair, employees weren’t very empathetic. “It was like they didn’t care, there was no compassion, and I just felt like ‘why did I even come into this store’,” she told Kurtis Ming.

Once they heard the word “reporter,” Fry’s agreed to exchange the computer for something else, and offered the family a $100 gift card for all of the computer-less trouble.

They exchanged the laptop for a Sony tablet, which… already broke. In this case, the manufacturer’s warranty still applies, so maybe it won’t take a quarter of a year to get the device back.

Call Kurtis: How Long Can Stores Keep My Product For Repair Under Warranty? [CBS Sacramento]

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