The Texas Attorney General filed suit against aptly named electronics retailer Conn’s, accusing the store of aggressively marketing extended warranties to customers, then doing everything in its power to avoid honoring those warranties.
ELECTRONICS
RadioShack Electronics Trade-In Program Not The Fastest Way To Get Cash
By 5.14.09
A Dallas Morning News blogger decided to test out RadioShack’s new trade-in program, where you mail them your unwanted cellphone, for example, and they mail you a gift card, which you can then turn around and use to buy 7,000 house brand AAA batteries. As you might expect, RadioShack didn’t offer him as much money for his Blackberry Storm as he saw them going for on eBay, but the real problem came from the missed deadlines and delays in getting his gift card: what they said would take one week ended up taking 5 1/2 weeks, and might have taken longer had he not emailed them.
Creative Labs Charges "Maintenance Fee" For Rebate
By 5.13.09
Creative Labs has found a great new way to minimize the risk that a customer will actually benefit from a rebate offer. In Rick’s case, they sent him the rebate in the form of a $10 debit card that was supposed to be good until July 2009, but when he went to a Best Buy to use it last month, it was denied. The reason? He’d been charged a $3 “maintenance fee” every month since January.
Did Bad Customer Service Doom Circuit City?
By 5.10.09
Best-practices guru Joel Spolsky thinks Circuit City imploded because of their terrible customer service, not any “recession” or “macroeconomic conditions” nonsense. To prove his point, he looks at thriving New York electronics retailer B&H, which succeeds because they understand that stellar service leads to healthy profit margins.
Will Apple Gobble Up Electronic Arts?
By 5.5.09
CNBC’s Guy Adami said on CNBC’s Fast Money TV show that there’s talk that Apple may try to take over video game goliath Electronic Arts.
Panasonic Won't Replace Defective DVD/VCR Combo
By 4.30.09
David in Massachusetts bought a Panasonic combination VCR/DVD player about a year ago. It came with a special feature none of his previous Panasonic VCRs had: it randomly freezes. A lot.
Radio Shack Punches Customer In Face
By 4.29.09
Instead of getting his money back, one Radio Shack customer got a sock in the jaw when he tried to return something. According to the police report, the employee wouldn’t let the customer return the item. When the customer asked to speak to a manager – kapow! And you thought the worst thing you had to worry about was if you kept your receipt!
Meritline Using Misleading "Free HDMI" Cable To Sell Digital TV Converter With No HDMI Output?
By 4.22.09
Matthew emailed us with an interesting link to a Meritline offer that he says is making the rounds on deal sites. The Airlink digital-to-analog converter box is a fairly generic offer, but Meritline is offering a free HDMI cable with it. The only problem is, there’s no place on the box to use the cable. If you just see “free HDMI cable” and don’t read the specs closely, you’ll be in for a rotten surprise when the box arrives. But hey, free cable.
"New" Phone Bought Off EBay Turns Out To Be Used, Porny
By 4.22.09
Lillian bought what she thought was a new phone from an eBay seller with a lot of great feedback. The longer she has it, though, the more evidence she finds that it’s probably not new. Sometimes buying electronics off of eBay is like slowly peeling an onion.
Report: Best Buy Demoting 8,000 Senior Sales Associates
By 4.17.09
A report from New York investment firm Sanford Bernstein says that Best Buy will be eliminating 1,000 assistant manager positions and demoting 8,000 senior sales associates to regular sales positions that would pay 25 percent to 50 percent less than their current salary — causing some to compare them to Circuit City.
Systemax Wants To Buy Circuit City Website For $6.5 Million
By 4.13.09
Systemax, the company behind Tiger Direct (and the buyer of CompUSA’s remains when it went out of business over a year ago) has announced it plans to buy the Circuit City e-commerce business for $6.5 million cash plus a share of the revenue over a 30 month period.
CircuitCity.com Threatens To Rise From The Ashes
By 4.8.09
A mysterious message can be found at the website of recently-defunct retailer Circuit City.
Best Buy Gives Reader $30 Gift Card For Selling Her "New" DVD Player Preloaded With XXX Movie
By 4.7.09
After Lisa’s story of how she bought an ostensibly new DVD player from Best Buy only to find an adult DVD already in it went up on Consumerist, the retailer contacted her and sent her a $30 gift card. The original DVD player cost $29.99. That was nice of them, as Lisa was more amused than bothered at the situation in the first place. She wrote, “It was pretty funny! At first my husband was thinking, “Sweet!!! Score…” when we opened it up. We got a good laugh, but then I started thinking, “Wait a second, we bought it as a regular item, not open boxed. Why is there a DVD in there then?”
Best Buy Taking Over Circuit City Credit Cards
By 3.31.09
“Good news about your credit card account,” proclaims the letter Wilman recently received from Chase. Starting in May, you’ll be able to use that Circuit City card to make purchases at Best Buy. We think this is more like “mixed feelings” news, but on the plus side you won’t have an otherwise good credit card account closed (assuming you care about your FICO score). See the Chase letter below.
Do Not Think About Walmart's Website Price Matching Policy Or Risk Brain Damage
By 3.26.09
Reader Doug bought a TV at Walmart this morning — and then he returned a TV at Walmart this morning. Why? Because even though Walmart’s website lets you buy things at the lower website prices and have them shipped to the store for free — you have to wait for the warehouse to ship the TV to your local Walmart — even if they already have the TV in stock.
Gazaro Rates Gadget Sales Based On Historical Price Data
By 3.16.09
If you’re shopping around for a TV, computer, camera, or other consumer electronics gadget, you may want to add Gazaro to your online toolbox. The service, which is free but requires registration, tracks items that are listed on sale, then rates the sale price by comparing it to the item’s pricing history. It’s an easy way to quickly scan a list of current sales and see which ones are actually good deals. We like it, but there are still some areas that could be improved.
Office Depot To Employees: "Don't Lie About Inventory"
By 3.13.09
An anonymous Office Depot employee sent us this internal reminder from HQ that addresses this week’s allegations that associates and managers lie about inventory depending on the customer. Now the next time you’re told by an Office Depot associate that the laptop you want is out of stock, you can say, “Are you absolutely sure? Because I know you had a Sales Practices Reminder on March 12th about lying to customers.” And if a manager tries to get all up in, uhm, your grill area, you can say, “Don’t you have some tasks to go check off in your Task Manager?”
Every Time Dell Touches My Laptop It Gets A Little More Broken
By 3.10.09
Reader tking says his laptop started out with a bad power jack — but has slowly escalated in brokenness with each Dell intervention.
