What is Digg?225 Comments
- DrMatt, on 10/11/2007, -19/+222Ummm... Why didn't he notice the weight of the box? Shouldn't it have been VERY light?
- sockpuppets, on 10/11/2007, -4/+155Quick, put the box on eBay. I'm sure someone will give him $270 for it if he words it properly.
- nogami, on 10/11/2007, -10/+144Is it the guy's responsibility when buying a camera from a store to ensure that the camera is actually IN the box they give him? No. That's the store's responsibility, and even more important on open-box clearance items.
Clearance or not, the store doesn't have a leg to stand on. The purchase contract is for a product of a camera, not an empty box. The merchant is responsible for holding-up their end of the contract. No camera = no contract = money back.
If taken small claims court, he'll win without a doubt. In the meantime, CompUSA will be getting tons of bad PR about it. Any bets on how fast they fold?
N. - hndgns4hrts, on 10/11/2007, -9/+127This isn't the first time it has been done, back in my days at CompUSSR we sold a empty office box (an honest mistake), and our GM would not allow us to refund the guys 130 $ instead offered him 10% of a new copy.
Needless to say the guy returned 2-3k worth of stuff, and a hefty service plan.
CompUSSR is a ***** company, to deal with in anyway, customer or employee stand point. - thatsmyaibo, on 10/11/2007, -8/+94I went to Japan in 2001 for a couple of months and bought a Sony printer that printed on wallet sized photo paper. Anywho, when I brought it back to the place i was staying, everything but the printer was in it. With instructions, cartridges and so forth in there, the weight seemed ok. I took it back the next day and they said for my troubles, they would give me 2 in and photo paper replacement packages. That's customer service and the Japanese folks were much more apologetic and reasonable. Night and day to American retail.
- Tankslap, on 10/11/2007, -10/+93The box was clearly mislabeled. It should have said Duke Nukem Forever in bold print.
- st0nes, on 10/11/2007, -5/+81He bought a bunch of other stuff as well ($3500 dollars worth), so amongst all the other boxes he might not have noticed that one was lighter than it should have been. He should get his money back.
- graystar, on 10/11/2007, -3/+40In the old days, this was called Fraud.
- TheGambit, on 10/11/2007, -10/+45wow $269 for an empty camera box. The only thing more unbelievable than this was their response that they could not honor the exchange because it was his fault they sold him an empty box!
I guess we know now why Comp USA is closing the 126 stores! - roosterjm2k2, on 10/11/2007, -7/+42Actually, buying alot of items and wrongfully returning something does, in fact, happen alot. Its easier to get a store to budge on a return if they risk losing high-dollar sales over it.
First, let me get something out here... CompUSA isnt a bad company at all. Maybe the store that ome of you worked at that say they are terrible just had a bad manager? I worked there for 2 years...not a complaint at all other than constantly being told to sell more warranty *****, but thats almost any retail these days. I didnt (ok, there is going to be alot of words lacking apostrophes ... ***** firefox quicksearch bug) usually attach more than 2% (thats usually about how many people ASK for it...i never offered it) and even though the requirement was like 15%, i never got a written notice or any "official" warning. Not only that, but our store consistantly got the highest ratings in the region for customer satisfaction...and I cant honestly think of a single "corporate" issue that ever caused a fuss (other than the fact that they rape on profit margin for ram...but, again, common in retail)
Aside from that, I know for a fact that people try this. In 2 years, i seen this same claim 3 times are items -I- sold. Once was a copy of office 2000 with the microsoft seal on teh box still ... he claimed the box was empty ... if he had just taken the CD out, he might of gotten it, but he took the manual out as well...and 2000 had the heavy manual still ... i personally went to the lockup to grab the box for him, and i KNOW it wasnt empty. The 2 others were both electronics. 1 was a first-gen IPOD ... again, when I sold anything in boxes without seals on them (Apple is the worst about not actually sealing a box...i think they want stores to be able to show off their product...i dunno), but i checked it. This particular case i know for sure that I checked the box because i remember the guy actually reachign into the box while i was opening it to grab it to check it himself.... like 3 days later he came back, while he was making his claim I walked up and he went into the "you know what...i dont need to talk to you...im just going to call corporate." he never did.
The last one, of all things, was, and this is the best, a sony camera (the ones that had the floppy drive built in ... hot ***** at the time) ... he bought one one day..came back like 4 hours later. Not only did the serial # on the box not match either the one I had wrote down when i checked it out of the lockup, but it didnt match the one that the register scanned either. Top it off with the fact that the serial DID match a number that was stolen and missing on inventory like 2 weeks before. What makes this story ever sweeter was that when we noticed the serial, we quietly called the police. They arrested him for possession of stolen property, and based on a complaint that was filed against him from best buy like 3 days earlier for trying to return a stolen video card, they got a warrant for his house and found like $250,000 worth of stolen stuff. Not only that, but he documented all his buy & switch (steal one, buy one, return stolen one as empty or put weight in the box and seal it back up ...) stuff so when they looked at his computer, they realized that this guy was making a really nice living off of stealing...and somehow managed to work on it for over a year and not get caught....
Im not saying this guy is scamming anyone. But if stores just took you for your word, it wouldnt take long for them to be out of business. Sometimes you just have to face that fact that ***** happens to everyone, and youre going to get bit in the ass every once in a while. - RagingWombat, on 10/11/2007, -2/+37Half the time the manuals weigh more than the actual camera does, so I can see where the mistake might be.
- AriaStar, on 10/11/2007, -21/+54@ nogami:
How the hell do you know that the guy didn't take the camera out of the box and then complain? If CompUSA and every other company out there were to just refund every buyer who said that "the box was empty" to try to be nice guys and err on the side of caution, then you'd have the problem of people buying stuff, taking it out, and trying to get money back.
On top of that, a liquidation company sold the camera. CompUSA would have sold the stock they were getting rid of to the liquidation company, and the liquidation company then sold it. He needs to take his complaint to the liquidation company. CompUSA is in the clear on this one. - ryogahibiki, on 10/11/2007, -1/+31A similar incident happened a Best Buy last year when a man bought a $1600 camera and inside was a jar of spaghetti sauce!
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2006-11-27-pasta-camcorder_x.htm - ninjapirateUK, on 10/11/2007, -0/+26I work in a camera shop in the uk and we had a guy return a box saying there was no camera in it, the management issued a refund to him. The next week the same guy returned the camera as faulty to another store in the next town and said that he threw away the box. So typically the management issued a second refund. Harsh if the guy in the story is genuine but there are good reasons that they wont issue refunds for stuff like that.
- Junkey, on 10/11/2007, -12/+38Yo momma soooo dumb she bought an empty box!
- AmandaEmily, on 10/11/2007, -4/+30If its your typical small digital, the boxes are very light anyway - huge boxes of mostly packing material.
- DrKillPatient, on 10/11/2007, -2/+27I (unfortunately) worked there for a short period of time (quit). I'm surprised they didn't try to sell him an extended warranty on the empty box.
- dingdingding, on 10/11/2007, -0/+24So he bought Schrödinger's camera.
- poet, on 10/11/2007, -1/+19One time, when I used to work at Staples, we sold someone a Digital Rebel XTi and inside the box was just a jar of tomato sauce to simulate the weight. Was *****' ridiculous. We gave him a refund though and sent it back to Canon, sauce en route.
- gimianame, on 10/11/2007, -5/+21I bought a music cd from best buy - new and in the wrapper - I open it up and nothing was inside...brought it back to weird looks, but I ended up with an exchange. Even if the guy did return an empty box and take the camera, the store is still in no position to judge his character and accuse him of fraud unless proven otherwise.
- Ouze, on 10/11/2007, -0/+15As a guy who likes to buy expensive digital cameras and then returns the boxes loaded with jars of spaghetti sauce and/or vibrators to big box retailers, I'm getting a kick out of some of these replies.
- Rhino2, on 10/11/2007, -7/+21
Mmmm, sixteen hundred dollar spaghetti sauce. That stuff is WAY better then olive garden. - Goombellaofgoom, on 10/11/2007, -0/+12I think Best Buy works with the anti-commission policy. Instead of "Sell more and you'll get a percentage or bonus," They tell their employees: "Make your sales quota or you're fired."
- Oracle95, on 10/11/2007, -1/+12It's funny how everyone is trashing CompUSA. I used to prefer that store to Best Buys. I always assumed that Best Buys worked on commission because of the hard sell the reps made on the computers. I work with computers at my job and every Best Buys I've been to has treated me like an idiot because I'm a woman. They're worse than car dealers who think I'm only interested in the vanity mirrors and the radio.
Plus, I'll never forget when my brother in law bought a computer from Best Buys, only to discover later that most of the software that came pre-installed was pirated.
The morale of the story, any chain can have made management, some are just more likely to have it than others due to corporate encouragement. - smacksaw, on 10/11/2007, -0/+11Unbelievable, but true:
I worked at Comp, and the San Marcos store had some Seagate hard drives come in.
Guy buys one, takes it home and opens it...not a hard drive in there. Care to guess what it was?
Cocaine.
The entire shipment of hard drives was cocaine. Amazingly the guy DROVE it back to the store. If he got busted for speeding on the way...what a dumbass. So the Sheriffs came and took it all away, but it was like 32 drives in the shipment and they were all 100% coke where the HD should be.
We did, however give the guy a refund. I think a lot of this stuff depends on the IQ of the manager, but my experience was generally that CompUSA was pretty easy on returns, even after Slim took over. - AriaStar, on 10/11/2007, -8/+19How do you know he didn't take the camera out of the box and try to exchange the empty box to get two cameras for the price of one?
- NearlyHeadless, on 10/11/2007, -5/+15"Buying everything and returning it costs him nothing and is used to try to make the story credible."
He didn't return any of the items he bought. - gutistg, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9How does that make it his fault?
- aragon127, on 10/11/2007, -2/+10A similar thing happened to me at Compusa. I bought a video card, the last Voodox model they made if I remember correctly. When I got it home I noticed it was actually a cheap 16mb card in the $200 Voodoo box. They couldn't take it back because the CS reps couldn't figure out how to code it. I ended up processing a chargeback on the credit card for it.
- subxero37, on 10/11/2007, -4/+12@Sino: Weird, 'cause I don't ever remember screwing cameras in America...
- Cerebral, on 10/11/2007, -4/+11@rooster
You are absolutely correct on everything you stated. I worked at two different CompUSA stores over the course of 4 years and I was the Customer Service return guy.
You all would be surprised as to just how easy it is to get the store to take a hit on their "shrink" numbers in order to keep customers from "calling corporate". Calling corporate was the threat to end all arguments and generally the customer would win no matter what the case. The reason is that if a customer called corporate on your store for whatever reason all management lost $$ on bonuses starting with the GM and would trickle down from there. The GM almost never made his bonus on having the .25% shrink number (usually around .4%) so they would gladly take a hit there. Not only that but they could easily doctor those numbers to not reflect true shrink numbers by placing items in RMA and let them sit there for months and then take them off the shrink number on a month when they were lower.
The worst case was when Microsoft moved to the blister packaging for the XP and office 2003 product and someone had taken the package home, opened the blister pack by attempting to slyly unmeld (unmelt?) the plastic around the outsides, took out the disk only and brought it back claiming the box was opened when he got it and the disk was not inside. Well the customer used the "corporate" excuse and the manager on duty took the item back! Needless to say it almost cost CompUSA the loss of a long time employee (over 10 years) because of the fact that Comp did not side with it's employee on this also considering how rude the customer was to the employee.
There is a lot of scum out there that love to target big box stores because they will bend over backwards when they feel that they may lose some bonus $. The sad part is that just like DRM, the honest customers are the ones who suffer when it comes to honest mistakes, errors and returns. I would say that the biggest thing that we ran into that pissed us off is the "rental" customers. Since our store was the closest to the airport we would have lots of business people who would be in town for a meeting and forget _________ so they would come purchase it at our store and return in a couple days before they went back or even later that day. For non business people it was the people who need to do ONE thing and they don't have the thing they need so they would come purchase it, do the thing they needed to do and then bring it back. You could always spot out these people because they would actually ask you questions and you could pick out what it was they needed to do. Needless to say but those two types of people are the reason why you have a 15% restocking fee on opened items. I personally never charged the fee to legitimate people but to those that I sold anything to that I felt was going to be a rental, I warned them up front about the fee and was sure to note it on the receipt to charge them the fee.
and not that I don't side with this customer (as hard as it is) but I have seen cases where a camera is sold (open box) and either a different camera was in the box or there was an empty box. No matter which the situation was, we always had the camera that SHOULD have been in the box and swapped with the customer. I'm sorry but I smell a rat here. - rrasco, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7thats it! at least I now know to open all gifts prior to giving them out as any normal gift giver should be.
- venom8599, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8In this case, he didn't receive the item he paid for, so he isn't returning it, just asking for the money he paid for merchandise he didn't receive, or that they give him what he paid for.
- tmyprod, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7He should have gone back and bought all the "hard drives" he could afford. He would have made bank moving that much coke. And don't try to argue that he might not know anyone who could move that volume of cola, everybody knows someone who knows someone. i.e. True Romance.
- ventralnet, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9@drmatt
Not necessarily, i mean with some of the cameras today, the packaging materials will weigh more than the unit. - venom8599, on 10/11/2007, -2/+8He did buy it when he bought $3500 of merchandise, so it's not like he just walked out of the store with only the camera box.
- SolipsistD, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7It surprising how much you can get for an empty box on eBay .... £42.00
As it happens I saw this auction earlier today,
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Canon-Speedlite-430EX-Empty-Box-Exc-Mint_W0QQitemZ190115691179QQihZ009QQcategoryZ30033QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
...suspect the buyer didn't read the add very carefully (or at all). - ninjapirateUK, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6A friend of mine worked in Argos in the UK and they got a returned mobile phone and didnt check in the box when they issued a refund, when they processed the refund and actually looked in the box later they found a vibrator and batteries...
- GawtMilk, on 10/11/2007, -10/+16CompUSA recieves complaint from man claiming a liquidation company sold him an item that used to be CompUSA's, but it turned out to just be a box.
1) Talk to the liquidation company?
2) Any proof of this?
3) Didn't the box feel a little light? - hppyfngy, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7In a hurry, I once bought a flat screen monitor from CCity only to find an equally heavy piece of particle board inside days later. I totally freaked but they were cool about it and gave me another, which of course I opened before leaving the store...
Have to admit it took some cojones for the thief to return that piece of particle board for a refund, unless it disappeared from the stock room.. - Cerebral, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6So that's how CompUSA has been able to stay open for so long...
I worked there ~99 - 05 and there were always talks about comp going under, not making any money etc. Well this explains how they were able to keep going for as long as they did. - navghtivs, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7Similar thing happened to me in WalMart years ago: bought a 30GB HD, found it's a used 1GB HD inside, the manager baffled and argued and scolded and tried everything when I wanted to return it, eventually after many minutes she let me return it, and I never went to Walmart after that.
- nreisan, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6exactly it happens a lot of the time
but there are also legit cases where people get sold display model boxes on accident and you can usually tell - Cerebral, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Not only that but generally when they do the large purchases they will purchase the warranty as well and generally accept ANY addons you suggest to make it seem like you care. This will help their case when they try to come back. Plus stores HATE to return warranty and generally do ANYTHING to get out of doing it because so much rides on those damn things: bonuses, quotas, jobs, store rankings... the list goes on.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Depends, a lot of hand held things are very light.
I got an "open box" (though it was sealed back up) ipod from Best Buy that was really just an open box a few years ago. They didnt give me any trouble about returning it for a refund though. - roosterjm2k2, on 10/11/2007, -6/+11Flytrap, his purchase setup is a common retail scam though.
You buy alot of stuff ($3500 worth in this case). You then buy something you want to steal.. relatively high dollar. Then, you can do just what he did, threaten to return everything if they dont refund your empty box. Then if they do refund you...you just go to another store of that chain on the same day, and return the rest of your unopened items. You spend alot initially because it gives you some weight to throw around to get the refund.
Did he do this? Don't know...but you can't expect a store to act on blind faith. - s0nicfreak, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6I would've just kept the cocaine...
- adolfojp, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7@drmatt (#7001149)
My camera is very light and it came in a box with a heavy manual, some CDs, some Styrofoam, etc. There is virtually no way of telling if the camera is in the box or not without opening it. - labmouse42, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5All the COMPUSAs in this Atlanta area went out of business last month.
All their stuff was 60-80% off.
I got quite a nice stash of goodies for $300.
I was smart enough to check to make sure the stuff was in the boxes and in good condition.
This guy should have done the same. - LordBen, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4People are missing that this was bought from one of the stores being liquidated. Compusa no longer owns the store this was bought at thats why they're refusing to help him. On the other hand the store still has their branding all over the place, but the fact remains compusa did not sell him it...
if this guy sues compusa he will get nothing as compusa did not sell him the empty box the liquidator did. He needs to sue the liquidator for false advertising... i would agree no returns, but when you buy something you expect to get what your buying if it was broken i would say tough luck on the guy. -
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