Best Buy Customer Gets Box Full of Bathroom Tiles Instead of Hard Drive

The Consumerist is reporting that a Best Buy customer recently purchased a hard drive only to discover that the box contained six ceramic bathroom tiles instead of the Western Digital drive he had expected. The rub of it is Best Buy is refusing to grant a refund or exchange for the non-existent drive. "The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens. So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive and while I was checking the contents to ensure it was a hard drive this time, the store manager came up, took the box from me and said to take it up with the manufacturer. Now to my surprise, I argued with the guy saying that they have already accepted the return and I have now purchased the new one. He said I was shit out of luck. I followed up with the manufacturer today and they said they would get the complaint to the Best Buy Purchasing department. Best Buy corporate said that they stand by their manager's decision."

yep!

[jkinney3]

Sounds like Best Buy. With all the great press they get on/., why do people still go there?

Western Digital or bathroom tiles?

[jollyreaper]

Keep the tiles; they're more reliable.

And the worst thing is...

[tomknight]

...they'll somehow find child pornography on the tiles.

Don't Shop at Best Buy?

[morari]

I mean, seriously. Any time I'm in there it's nothing but a bunch of assholes trying to shove sales down your throat, sign you up for credit cards, etc. No one that works there ever knows what they're talking about either, so unless you're completely ignorant, they usually are of no help if you do happen to have questions.

I guess the one positive thing we could say is that at least the Best Buy employees don't drool on themselves within customer eyesight like RadioShack ones. :P

Re:yep!

[moderatorrater]

It's why I tend to grab all hardware at Compusa. As every time I've had an issue their extra warranty has resulted in a shiney new piece of gear replacement immediatly. It's a bit further then BB, but the more horror stories I hear about BB the less I go there.

"I was tired of North Korea's harsh penalties for being a citizen. That's why I moved to Iran!" ;)

Obligatory

[Psychor]

Receiving those tiles must have driven him up the wall.

Re:I side with Best Buy here

[xarnx]

Shouldn't that read "Fool me once, shame on.... shame on you. Fool me twice...... .... .... Fool me can't get fooled again?"

Re:It happened before.

[bluelip]

Wow... imagine how the guy at Home Depot is going to feel when he finds this whiz-bang-blinkenlights metal brick in his box of tiles.

Re:I side with Best Buy here

[Grishnakh]

Dammit, our stupid President has forever ruined that fine saying.

Re:Chargeback

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto, go to your credit card company and dispute it. I have done this numerous times for lost shipments or wrong products...it has never gone to "stage 2" where the merchant objects and the CC bank has to investigate. Can't say I got building materials instead of electronics!

You can also make life fun for the PC sales department. Back with XP home (not sure about Vista) reboot the PC to F8 safe boot. This allows you to get in and change the passwords for all accounts. You can also kindly use gparted to erase all partitions. This won't physically damage the PC either so I it might not even be criminal, where as they have committed a crime against you!

Revenge is beautiful.

Using Anonymous Coward in case Best Buy ends up with 100s of display PCs they can't login to or use.

Good Luck, I hope your chargeback serves you justice. Where they nice color tiles?

I was at Home Depot ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at Home Depot and bought a box of tiles. To my surprise, it had a hard drive in it.

Re:Similar incident

[heroofhyr]

I had a similar experience last spring. I purchased a sack of manure from the gardening wholesaler and when I got home and opened the bag it was full of F# documentation.

Re:It happened before.

[garnetlion]

grass roots campaign scam Best Buy.

As opposed to all those slick, corporate-funded attempts to scam Best Buy.

Re:It happened before.

[WEFUNK]

Actually it reminds me more of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3DYbE44OIE [youtube.com]

According to the clip, if he bought it in Canada he might be covered by the Canadian Criminal Code where "there's legal precedent setting cases in law" for this sort of thing.

Or these precedents might only apply to "mice" not hard drives...

Re:yep!

[griffjon]

I presume most /. types go there to do this: http://xkcd.com/272/ [xkcd.com]

Re:I also had this happen to me at BB

[Anonymous Coward]

When I got the new box, I noticed the shrink wrap was different. I always check the shrink now and often will open it after I purchase it while still at the register. I also NEVER buy the first item on the shelf, but go to one farther back.

Thanks. That's a good pointer.

I'll have to remember it when seeding Best Buy's shelf with re-shrink-wrapped boxes of construction materials.

Re:Don't Shop at Best Buy?

[elrous0]

Oh man, Radioshack is worse than a used car lot. every time I go in one I have to get rude just to keep the sales zombies at bay. You almost have to come armed. And God help you if you need to check out quickly. "No, i'm not giving you my address and phone number." "No, I'm not interested in your battery club." "JUST LET ME BUY MY CABLE!"

Congratulations!

[DaFork]

Did you know that your post today qualifies you for a FREE 3 month subscription to Sports Illustrated?

Also, you can get double karma on your posts today if you sign up for our preferred poster program. It only takes five minutes to sign up!

Re:It happened before.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me about a joke, from my country in the past.

A guy from the local mafia decided he needed a new house. After the construction of his new house was finished, he called one of his best friends to see his home.
When he asked his friend, what he thought, his friend said he was rather impressed. But he didn't like the tiles in the bathroom, they were rather ugly and he wondered how his friend could afford such an expensive house, but buy such crappy bathroom tiles.
The guy from the mafia disagreed. "They are not inexpensive at all. Come with me"
They went to the bathroom again. "Can you see what's written on them?"
And his friend noticed with surprise that all tiles were labelled "Intel Pentium Pro"

Shoplifting

[tripmine]

This is why I don't feel bad about shoplifting.

Re:It happened before.

[PopeRatzo]

Well, let's see: We know that Best Buy has machines for shrinkwrapping, because they wrap their "refurbished" and returned merch. Since the price of a shrink-wrap machine and the hassle and time involved are worth a lot more than the $300 ($300?? what was this, one of the new quantum hard drives?) I place the criminal activity inside the store. It's probably the old "tamper with the shelved merchandise and get a new hard drive" routine, which was popular among dope fiend-retail workers back in the day.

I'm guessing one of the Geek Squad is a tweaker/video gamer who decided he wants a spiffy new hard drive for free. He's probably high as a kite, playing WoW right this minute.

Have you seen who works in Best Buy these days?

Re:It happened before.

[Cajun Hell]

Also, are you implying that today you CAN return software with the shrink wrap broken? I find that surprising, but I haven't tried to return software in a long time.

I tried returning software a few months ago, but ibiblio.org wouldn't let me upload the damned unstable Gentoo packages back to the ftp server. Bastards!

Re:It happened before.

[Paradise Pete]

Lord knows salesperson incompetence is a believable story at Fry's.

A few weeks ago I was in Fry's looking for a laptop stand. I asked a clerk and he said "You mean the kind you put coins in?"

I didn't know how to answer that.

Re:It happened before.

[Anonymous Coward]

way to go, snitch.

Re:It happened before.

[Hal_Porter]

If I had the catalog handy, I'd be quoting you prices right now.

I wouldn't buy a shrink wrap machine off someone who already owned one. They could sell me a box of bricks shrinkwrapped into the original shrink wrap machine box and then spend the money on heroin. Vermin bastards. If I ever start a religion the penalty for shrink wrap crime would be to be shrink wrapped to death on a cross.

Not that you could trust the people doing the execution come to think of it. God damnit.

Re:It happened before.

[stefanlasiewski]

imagine how the guy at Home Depot is going to feel when he finds this whiz-bang-blinkenlights metal brick in his box of tiles.

Home Depot only sells two kinds of tile: smashed tiles, and missing tiles. I'm sure this metal brick will be smashed into a million pieces before it even reaches the shelf.

Re:It happened before.

[Dachannien]

Maybe I have a mind filled with depravity after reading /. for this long, but I have to admit I expected quite a different story after you used the phrase "bad shrink-wrapping experience" ;)

Re:It happened before.

[Anonymous Coward]

Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.

Re:It happened before.

[geminidomino]

I think I speak for many of us when I say:

What the fuck is a pillow sham?

Re:It happened before

[PReDiToR]

No, that is simply not true.

The liability rests with the retailer for ensuring that what they sell you is what is advertised. If I were to tell you that I had a bridge for sale and told you the name of it was "London Bridge" and you got a crappy little bridge made from a few pieces of stone, I would be telling the truth, but if I showed you a picture of Tower Bridge in London and called it "London Bridge" you could sue me to high heaven for misrepresenting what I ended up buying.

The box shows a hard drive, the paperwork (receipt) shows a hard drive, by extension you expect to be able to store more than the 10 commandments on it and they sold it as fit for a certain purpose.
A box of tiles does not match what was handed over in the transaction and therefore the onus is on the store to take back the goods and (under UK law: give full money back) or at the least (I believe in the States) give a store credit to the value of the monies paid.
The store can then begin the process of chasing up the person that defrauded them out of a perfectly working hard drive and replaced it with a few lousy tiles. Not that they will have much luck, plausible deniability as has been stated in other posts goes a long way to establishing innocence.

Re:It happened before.

[Fieryphoenix]

Oh, we learnt them English. Learnt em real Old School. Then they came back and we learnt em agin. The Canucks'll say different, but its all sour grapes on their part. Ayup.

Re:It happened before.

[jagdish]

Reminds me about a joke, from my country in the past.

Are you from Soviet Russia?

Re:It happened before.

[AttillaTheNun]

One of the geek squaders tried to convince me that the AMD64 laptop I was looking at was 32x faster than the 32bit version. When I challenged him on the stupidity of that statement, he admitted I had to upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate to take advantage of the AMD64.

This DorkStick actually tried to up-sell me to Vista in his back peddling!

I ordered him to turn in his Slashdot ID at the nearest kiosk.

What I really hate is.....

[Anonymous Coward]

after formatting you can only use 5 of the tiles.

Re:Smithers posts on /.

[porcupine8]

I'm a girl, dumbass.

Sigs: Don't turn them off, they're useful sometimes.

Re:It happened before

[NaturePhotog]

Dear Mistuh Togie,

I'm glad I finally twacked you down. I've been getting endless junk mail related to prowducts I've never purchased. I got a restwaining order against that pesky wabbit, but the junk mail still kept coming.

May you wot in hell.

sincerwly,
Elmer J. Fudd

Re:It happened before

[Agripa]

Agreed, and I've never given them my real info. *I* know I'm not ripping 'em off, and so feel no reason to jump through hoops clueless suits create.

Somewhere, in a marketing database somewhere, sits:

Elmer Fudd
22 Acacia Avenue
San Antonio, RI, 90210

So you are an identity as well as a hard drive thief! That is my name and address!

Err, wait. You have my apologies. I misread my ID which says Jules Vern.

Re:It happened before.

[Jhon]

rll = real life lesbian?

My Favorite Best Buy Open Box Experience

[Kagato]

I was shopping in Best Buy one day. I was looking at hard drives. Some other customer was looking at a couple open box video cards. He asks one of the blue shirts if he can open up the video card and check it out. Blue shirt says sure. I look over and the customer pulls a modem out of the video card box. He asks the blue shirt where the monitor plugs in. I interrupt and tell them that's a modem and not a video card. The customer puts the modem back in the box, hands it to the blue shirt and walks away.

Then what does the blue shirt do? He puts the box BACK ON THE SHELF.

Re:It happened before.

[Sfing_ter]

As my friend A.J. used to say,"I will work anywhere for $5 an hour, just let me take the garbage out once a day..."

Re:It happened before.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is a pillow sham?

It's nothing but a big fat cushion filled with lies...LIES I TELL YOU!

Re:It happened before.

[unitron]

And his friend noticed with surprise that all tiles were labelled "Intel Pentium Pro"

He should have gone with the old Socket 4 Pentiums instead and he would have had a wall-mounted space heater for those frosty mornings.

Of course even with Socket 8 walls he's got a very limited upgrade path.

Re:It happened before.

[192939495969798999]

If you think you'll continue to have sex just for that, you must not have lived with her for very long.

Re:It happened before

[Shakrai]

I once ordered three widgets and got six. This widget came in boxes of two. Someone at the warehouse had put three boxes of widgets in the shipping box, not three widgets.

I stopped at a local computer shop once upon a time to buy a network card. Got carried away, wound up buying a NIC, new video card, and a hard drive. Came to about $350. Paid with my credit card and left.

Few days later I notice a $350 credit on my card. I go back and look at the receipt and realize that the guy processed it as a CREDIT instead of a CHARGE. So I'm gonna do the right thing and tell him about it. Stop in his store a little while later:

Me: Hey, I was in here the other day. I think you messed up the charge for my credit card.
Him: I didn't OVERCHARGE you sir, and I'm getting sick of people nickel and diming me.
Me: Yeah, you didn't overcharge me, I was looking at this receipt and....
Him: Read the sign. NO REFUNDS, NO RETURNS
Me: Your right, what was I thinking?

Went in to do the right thing and got attitude for it. So fuck 'em. They never did catch it. They PAID ME $350 to take their stuff. For some reason they went out of business a few months later..... ;)

Re:It happened before.

[flappinbooger]

So, Home Depot is a NASA subcontractor now.... That explains things.