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Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
101–110 of 200 posts
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
EDIT: My apologies. It looks like I'll need to have a discussion with my friend about this.
> This seems impossible. Returns require a receipt. I don't know what you're talking about. 1. Buy item #1, obtain receipt, take it home 2. Go back into store, find identical item #2, take it past checkout counter and up to return counter 3. "Return" item #2 using receipt for item #1 4. Profit For big ticket items there's usually a unique serial the store will scan to prevent this sort of thing, but not always. Prett…
In the OP situation this could play out like this:
1. Have a broken laptop (item #1)
2. Buy a new laptop (item #2)
3. Return item #1 with item #2's receipt
4. Have a working computer.
note: I'm not condoning this and it's unlikely to working in the OP's case because stores are usually smart enough to check serials on bigger ticket items.
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#103[deleted]
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#104I know the feeling! Living in Puerto Rico is a double edge scenario. I might be fully treated as an US customer with all the benefits or they just don't consider us a US Territory. Sometimes we are another country somewhere in the Caribbean, sometimes we get confused with Latin America and then the options for services just becomes close to none.
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#105You probably aren't familiar with how "guarantees" work here in South America, ugh. See companies like Samsung and Toshiba have "certified" stores that "take guarantees" but they are not tied by their parent company, they are privately owned stores that just negotiated with the parent company to use their "sticker". I bought a Phillips shaver and under warranty, the Phillips station wanted me to pay 70% of the cost o…
Yup, that's the case in both Argentina and Brazil too. But then, customer service sucks pretty much at every level. In the US you can buy a product from Walmart, use it for a couple weeks and if you aren't happy with it just return/exchange it (and yes, you get your money back, not some store credit.) Coming from Argentina, I was amazed the first time it worked and felt like I was ripping someone off. After a while I…
The question is: why the difference?
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
EDIT: My apologies. It looks like I'll need to have a discussion with my friend about this.
Regarding returning things without a receipt: Once upon a time, it used to be possible to get Bing points by playing a bunch of stupid games on Club Bing - you could accumulate at most 1000 per day, unless there was some sort of modifier (like "double ticket day") site-wide. The prizes available for these points were usually older Microsoft products like old games (9.99USD), kitchen appliances, hammocks, cheap headph…
I love that story.
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
EDIT: My apologies. It looks like I'll need to have a discussion with my friend about this.
> "If the companies didn't want you to do this, then they wouldn't let you do this." That is a poor assumption that is likely incorrect more often than not. A Chinese restaurant that I go to occasionally has a bowl of mints by the register. I could take a handful of them, they would not stop me, but that would be a dick move. I could go hang out at library and pass the time by taking their books off the shelves and b…
With policies like these, companies account for the % of times abuse is likely to happen. Retailers and manufacturers spend millions analyzing buying and returning patterns and factor that into prices.
So "abuse" over time could cause prices to increase by a small amount. However, not hassling people over things that rarely happen increases loyalty, which increases volume, which increases the discounts a retailer can get from a manufacturer...
The vast majority of people don't need to benchmark video cards or want to "rent" products - they buy things because they need them and that's why good customer service exists.
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people do abuse this to rip companies off, to varying degrees; I know some people who treat returns as free rentals, buying something, using it without ever intending to keep it, and then returning it. Some people go even further and steal things and then return them for cash. But I guess that on the whole, the good customer experience for the honest customers outweighs the cost of fraud.
EDIT: My apologies. It looks like I'll need to have a discussion with my friend about this.
I remember swinging by Home Depot just before a big winter storm. One of the sales guys mentioned that they didn't have any generators in stock because people would buy them, leave them in the box, and return them if they didn't lose power during the storm. Presumably, they wouldn't return the generators if they were actually used due to a power outage. I seriously doubt that Home Depot wanted their customers to do that. Large companies do sometimes keep track of how many returns people rack up over time to identify bad actors (that's much harder with "no receipt" or "no questions asked" policies).
On the other hand, Kragen advertises that they have a loaner tool program. It's essentially a liberal return policy, as long as you don't break the tool while trying to repair your car. I have used that, when I had a functioning tool to return when I was done with the job.
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#109I've had bad experiences with Toshiba refusing to honor warranties before. After hours on the phone it turned out that the reason they wouldn't help me is because they had recorded my date of birth as the date of purchase and vice versa. Apparently no one there thought it strange that the laptop had been out of warranty for more than two decades... The one manager that did understand the absurdity of the situation still insisted that no one at his call center had the authority to make the obvious correction. Like the OP, I will never buy another Toshiba product, and I tell all my friends the same.
Re: Toshiba says they made a mistake but they still cannot help me
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "If the companies didn't want you to do this, then they wouldn't let you do this." That is a poor assumption that is likely incorrect more often than not. A Chinese restaurant that I go to occasionally has a bowl of mints by the register. I could take a handful of them, they would not stop me, but that would be a dick move. I could go hang out at library and pass the time by taking their books off the shelves and b…
With policies like these, companies account for the % of times abuse is likely to happen. Retailers and manufacturers spend millions analyzing buying and returning patterns and factor that into prices. So "abuse" over time could cause prices to increase by a small amount. However, not hassling people over things that rarely happen increases loyalty, which increases volume, which increases the discounts a retailer can…
Retailers also plan on a base level of shoplifting and employee theft, referred to as "shrinkage". However that isn't an excuse for that sort of bad behavior.