You know how Best Buy has these “service plans” that are some percentage of the actual price of the product? I guess if you buy these, they’ll replace your purchase in case anything goes wrong, and you get some kind of guarantee beyond the manufacturer’s warranty. Well, after my wife and I naively purchased a few of these years ago, we realized that they were not worth it. The money you save by not purchasing the “service plans” can be used to buy something else, and we have yet to have an electronic product last beyond the warranty and then suddenly malfunction.
What got a good laugh out of us yesterday was buying a phone for US$20 and being asked by the cashier whether we would want to buy a US$6 “service plan” for it or not. Seriously? Come on. It’s a $20 phone, and we’d pay a third of that cost to get a “service plan”? Service scam is more like it. Geez.
Better yet, Best Buy tells their workers to persuade consumers buying a PC to buy a backup disk for twenty bucks, when you could get it from a manufacturer’s website for free/cheaper than twenty bucks.
Yes, the industry wants you to buy all these extras that sound like a good idea, but you could do without it or you could get something better or the same thing for cheap. Not that new.
I pretty much pay extra for anything I’m worried about to get a proven brand. I bought a monitor a few years back from Circuit City, my first LCD. Glad to get rid of the CRT finally. The only unit they have of the model I want is a display model – but they assure me the manufacturer’s warranty is still good, they’ll give me a discount (something like 20%) and they’ll give me an extended warranty on it through them for an extra year for like $5.
I have it about six months when the back light blows with no warning. Just go to turn it on one day and you can only tell because the sun was shining on one corner pretty directly.
I call the manufacturer, asking for details on how to get this to them for warranty work. They ask for the serial number and say “oh, that model’s out of warranty.” I explain that I bought it six months ago and it has a year’s manufacturer warranty. She says “sir, there’s no way you bought this six months ago, you must be mistaken. The model is three years old.”
So I start reading the receipt to her and she gets flustered, then blurts, “wait, so they sold you a three year old monitor??” …. Yeah, thanks a lot. Needless to say after weeks of calling back and forth between the manufacturer, the store, and their support headquarters, along with numerous faxes of the receipt I FINALLY got the manufacturer to accept the warranty work.
They say they can’t fix it and send me a “new” one. The “new” one is two years old! So I call the manufacturer and ask for warranty work on it, just to see what they’d say. You guessed it, “that’s out of warranty!” I call the store/headquarters and explain the situation, and they have the gaul to tell me the extended warranty won’t cover replacements.
Unless you’re getting homeowners insurance or something of the like, these kinds of “securities” are just pointless.
When they try to sell you a $6 plan on a $20 phone you should tell them that sounds interesting but you’d like more info on it. Have them read you the warranty and explain it to you. Ask lots of questions. Get a manager involved too. Then decide not to get it.
Interesting approach, but that would just waste a lot of my time. I’m sure that might be fun to try at some point.
Not only would that waste a lot of your time, you’d be torturing the poor checkout drone who has nothing to do with Best Buy’s corporate policies and is just slaving away being treated like crap all day for minimum wage.
Please don’t take your anger at corporations out on the low-level workers who are getting screwed over just as hard if not harder than you are by their corporation, people.