On 06/18/2013 08:00 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote:
Anybody can have faulty product in their inventory and shipped out. The fault here is not so much their product, nor their shipping practice. The fault is the failure to refund or replace product that was shipped DOA.
There are cases where it's reasonable to fire a customer. (In my case it's usually cheapest, long-term, to refund and fire them. Usually the money in the refund is way cheaper than the emotional bullshit of firing a customer without a refund, plus refunds vastly reduce the negative word of mouth. I approach customer firings as a "I'm sorry I can't meet your needs." but I dono about retail. My suspicion is that they are making a mistake by making the customer eat the cost rather than just sending a refund and blacklisting the customer, but I don't know what the margin is. My only point here is that if they had shipped the drive properly, well, it would be pretty clear that you had ruined a set of hard drives.)
So yeah, in this case it was the shipping practice. Normally drives come with warranty; if I buy a bad drive, I RMA it with the vendor, not the retail outlet. But the vendor won't take it if the drive is physically damaged, either.
The problem here is that they had a policy that could be reasonable /if/ they shipped their drives properly. I mean, if they shipped their drives properly and the drives come back physically damaged? well, then it was probably you, right?
Problem is, newegg is famous for bad hard drive shipping. They made a big todo about improvements a while back, and they are better, but they are still almost always substandard by my standards. But then, I probably get around 1% of my hard drives from them, and I haven't ordered lately. (newegg never was much of a source for the 'enterprise' stuff... and usually when they are I can take the ad to my local vendor of choice and they match it, and I don't have to pay shipping, and the local vendor (kingstarusa) is really good at the rma type stuff.)
The fact that they have had those drive shipping problems, and they still assume that it's the customer's fault says that they are too stupid to be handling computer parts. There's all sorts of ways you can damage computer parts that are not obvious, that result in a part that looks okay, but fails months down the road.
So yeah. sounds like newegg needs to go back on my vendor blacklist. (they came off after they made the todo about solving their drive shipping problem.)
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