I recently rebuilt my workhorse PC at home after a contractor fried my old one by plugging a sheetrock saw into my UPS. One of the new components I bought was a Hitachi Deskstar 1TB hard drive. The drive comes with a three-year warranty.
Less than six months later, the drive began to fail, and my computer told me to back up and replace the drive immediately.
The first sign that getting Hitachi to replace the drive under warranty was not going to be entirely straightforward was when I entered the drive’s serial number into Hitachi’s “Is My Drive in Warranty?” form and got back “Invalid serial”. Um… no. [I later learned that this was because the serial number returned by SMART has extra characters at the beginning that aren't in the serial number printed on the drive label, and the web app doesn't know what to do with those extra characters. Stupid!]
As I recently wrote, my wife and I have been shopping for mattresses at Jordan’s Furniture. We still haven’t settled on a mattress to buy, but one thing that was very obvious to us the first time we tried them out was that our old bed pillows were awful, and we walked out of Jordan’s that night with two new ones.
I bought a king-size “Nature’s Rest” latex pillow. Here’s the box it came in:
Notice how the front of the box clearly says that this is a king-size pillow. So does the label on top of the box:
The pillow came rolled up tightly inside the box. The Jordan’s associate who sold it to me warned me that it could take as much as a week for it to expand to its full size. I was therefore only somewhat concerned when I got home and unpacked the pillow and discovered that it was significantly shorter than every other king-size pillow my wife and I have ever owned. Not only that, but it was significantly shorter than the pillow cover that came in the box with it. (more…)
We hired Winters Plumbing about six months ago to replace our heating system (old ducts in basement needed to be removed due to peeling asbestos, and while we were at it we went ahead and replaced the furnace as well). After the job was done, we enrolled in the Winters “Service Partner” program, which (for a $12.95 monthly fee) includes priority service, an annual inspection and tune-up, and a 15% discount on all jobs.
About a month ago, we got a voicemail message from winters asking us to call back to schedule our “safety inspection.” I thought this meant it was time for our annual tune-up, so I called back and scheduled it.
The plumber showed up at the arranged time, toured our house and basement without actually doing anything to our plumbing or heating system, and proceeded to quote to my wife prices for a long list of things we didn’t actually need, e.g., replacing our humidifier pad and our water heater, neither of which was due for replacement, or adding a waster filter to our humidifier, which was never mentioned by Winters as something we might need when they installed it just six months ago.
For the one thing we did need, a replacement for a broken toilet handle, he quoted a price of $238. Yes, that’s right, $238 to spend less than ten minutes installing a part that costs less than $5 at The Home Depot, a part which the plumber probably had sitting out in his van when he came to do our inspection. With our 15% discount, it would have been a “bargain” at “only” $202. The very same day he quoted this price to me, Winters was advertising on their Web site a special — $99 during business hours on any Thursday or Friday to replace your toilet handle, do a dye test to check the toilet for leaks, and inspect the toilet for other issues. In other words, as a service plan customer with priority service, I was quoted a price over $100 higher than the price being offered to new customers.
I sent a nasty letter to my contact at Winters about what had happened. That was about a month ago, but because Passover and such, I didn’t get a chance to speak with him about it until today. (more…)
My wife and I recently visited Jordan’s Furniture to look at mattresses. While we’ve had our problems with Jordan’s in the past, Mattresses are definitely a commodity item, the Jordan’s “sleep techs” really do seem to know what they’re talking about, and their mattress prices are quite reasonable.
We have a Jordan’s PowerCharge account which we opened several years ago, and we had planned on using it to buy a mattress as well, to get the zero-interest financing. While we were at the store, we asked their office to check if the account was still active, and they said it was closed after two years of inactivity and we’d have to reapply for a new account.
You may have heard that 3M changed the formula for its Scotchgard products a number of years ago after it was revealed that they were causing significant environmental damage (well, it’s actually much worse than that, but that’s the basic idea). The new Scotchgard doesn’t work as well as the old one did. Apparently, none of the anti-stain treatments currently on the market that aren’t bad for the environment work as well as the old, toxic ones did.
For a relatively small fee, Jordan’s Furniture used to apply an anti-stain treatment to new upholstered furniture and warranty that if the furniture got stained, they would get the stain out or replace the item at the expense. Well, actually, it was at the expense of Stainsafe, the company that provided the anti-stain treatment and administered the warranty.
However, in a recent visit to Jordan’s, my wife and I learned that Jordan’s no longer offers anti-stain treatments on new furniture. This is supposedly motivated by three factors: (1) Jordan’s wants to be an environmentally conscious company, and the anti-stain treatments are bad for the environment; (2) the anti-stain treatments that aren’t bad for the environment don’t work well; and (3) the microfibers used to cover a lot of the furniture sold at Jordan’s have some intrinsic stain resistance. I suspect there are two more factors that the Jordan’s associate didn’t share with us: (1) there were a lot of complaints about the Stainsafe warranty (google for “Stainsafe” and you’ll see what I mean); and (2) oh, by the way, Stainsafe is bankrupt. Of course, it’s not clear whether Jordan’s stopped offering Stainsafe because they went bankrupt, or Stainsafe went bankrupt because Jordan’s stopped offering it.
What Jordan’s will sell you, instead of anti-stain treatment, is a five-year limited warranty under an Extended Protection Program (EPP) administered by a third-party company. (more…)
A couple months ago, I posted here about the defective American Leather sleeper sofa sold to us by Jordan’s Furniture. In a nutshell, the sofa had a design defect — zippers were used to hold the seat-back cushions but weren’t strong enough to bear the weight — which caused our sofa to break; Jordan’s charged us $210 to replace it even though the sofa was under warranty; then the new sofa broke too. I wrote to Jordan’s, told them that it was now clear that a design defect that had caused our first sofa to break; that they should stop selling American Leather sleeper sofas until the design was fixed; and that they should refund the $210 we had been charged to replace our first sofa with another one that broke the same way. I also told them we didn’t want them to replace the sofa a second time, since one of the zippers on the third sofa would inevitably break just like the others, so there was no point.
Believe it or not, the story has a pretty good ending. (more…)
My wife was involved in an auto accident last September which was not her fault — she opened the door of her parked car after confirming that no one was coming, and another driver came whipping around a corner and hit her door. Her insurance company found her liable for the accident and issued an SDIP surcharge, because the regulations state that the person opening the door is assumed to be at fault whenever an accident like this occurs (just like the person in back is assumed to be at fault whenever one car rear-ends another).
Everyone with whom my wife spoke about the surcharge told her not to bother appealing. Several people claimed to have waged unsuccessful appeals when they were not at fault. The prevailing wisdom seemed to be that the system is rigged against drivers. Nevertheless, I insisted that she appeal and even ghost-wrote her affidavit (we chose to appeal in writing rather than attending the hearing).
Today we received a notice that my wife “did demonstrate a showing necessary to rebut the governing presumption of the applicable standard of fault,” and the surcharge was vacated. Woohoo!
Here’s the affidavit I wrote for her which was successful at getting the surcharge overturned:
I enjoyed your recent letter about the direct and indirect ways in which CJP has positively affected your life. Many in the Jewish community don’t realize how pervasive and beneficial CJP’s influence is, and I think it is extremely valuable to occasionally remind people. Your letter was an especially persuasive and effective reminder.
Having said that, I have a minor complaint I would like to share with you. I expect the merchants and organizations which I support to respect people’s privacy. There is one particular marketing / PR strategy which demonstrates an overt lack of respect privacy, and I was very sorry to see that your letter employed it.
I am speaking of the tactic of sending promotional materials in unmarked envelopes, sometimes even with handwritten rather than printed addresses, in an effort to fool their recipients into thinking that they contain personal rather than promotional correspondence.
There is only one reason for an official letter from the CJP, on CJP letterhead, to be sent in an envelope without any CJP markings on it, and that is to circumvent the fact that some recipients will discard a marked envelope unopened. That is their right, and intentionally circumventing it is akin to a traveling salesman’s foot in the door. Frankly, it’s just plain rude.
I hope that the CJP will reconsider the use of this technique in the future.
Credit Card Services
Post Office Box 7092
Bridgeport, CT 06601
Account Number XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX
I am writing to dispute the following charge:
01/29 02/01 85456110031701887007089 MAD HAT INTERNATIONAL COLUMBIA SC 18.45
Before making this purchase, I contacted the merchant and asked specific questions about the product I was considering purchasing, to determine if it would meet my needs. The answers to my questions provided by the merchant were objectively, factually incorrect. If the merchant had answered correctly, I would have known that the product was not suitable for my needs, and I would not have purchased it.
On the day the product arrived, February 2, 2010, I immediately ascertained upon opening it that the merchant had provided me with incorrect information and the product was useless to me. I put it back in its packaging without using it and sent the merchant email complaining about the problem. He did not respond to my email.
I sent another email February 22, and once again, the merchant did not respond.
Recently, the JanSport backpack I’ve been using for many years broke — the pull tab broke off of one of the zippers.
JanSport packs have a lifetime warranty. Following the instructions on the JanSport Web site, I sent the pack in for repair or replacement. The Web site promised a turnaround time of about two weeks.
About a week and a half later, I got this amusing postcard in the mail:
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