Thinkcorps

I am a hug fan of Best Buy. Why? Because in their pseudo-infinite wisdom, they have deemed it acceptable for consumers like me to buy items from their stores, open them, play with them, and then, after every button has been pushed, twiddled and tweaked, take those items back to the store—no questions asked. Honestly, it’s kinda cool.

Big Box Retailers
All the big retailers—Best Buy, Circuit City, Good Guys (the “bad guys”)—have these no-hassle return policies. I’ve brought opened cables back to Best Buy and they’ve happily accepted them and refunded my money—not store credit, mind you.

When you’re considering a new purchase, you want to take the product for a test drive. Do not trust some marketing copy off a manufacturer Web site. You have to make sure it’s going to plug in to all your different components correctly, that it does what you think it does, that you like the remote, etc. These devices are complicated, if you’re spending the money, you might as well get something that works.

When you find something you like, simply take a spin around the Net and see if you can get it cheaper. If you can, you just saved some cash. If not, well, your product’s already installed and creating happiness.

When returning items, for God’s sake, do it on a weekday, preferably early in the morning. Take a little time and save a lot of time. The customer service folk are generally nice, but they’re rarely fast.

The Warranty
OK, I’m going to go out on a limb here. In some situations, you might actually want to consider that in-store warranty. I know, I know, it’s sacrilicious. But consider what you’re buying.

Take the iPod, for instance. It’s expensive, extremely difficult to repair, and comes with a 1 year warranty. And while Apple is generally very gracious in repairing product defects, once you’re beyond a year you are sh*t out of luck, my friend. One year just doesn’t cut it for as expensive and vulnerable a device as a portable iPod.

Many manufacturers have tightened up their warranty repair processes as well. You’re either going to have to shell out to ship the item to some facility several states away (this gets muy expensive), or dump it at some seriously disreputable repair shop from which you can pretty much forget about seeing your product again. Dropping your product off at the local Best Buy is looking pretty good. It’s much more convenient, it covers your product all the way through its expected lifespan, and there’s no shipping costs.

If there was a better option out there, I’d certainly consider it, but after my receiver crapped out on me, I took it back to Best Buy after refusing to drop it off at the authorized repair center, which looked like it was run by someone who’d died in the early 70s. I was expecting to get reamed, but to my surprise, I had already purchased a warranty. I can only assume, after a few rounds of product returns (I had tried out several receivers), that I had ended up with a credit balance that I decided to blow on the warranty. They fixed the receiver, at no cost to me, within a week.

That’s a much happier ending than I got with my 2nd-gen iPod and its crappy broken headphone jack (a recallable design flaw, in my humble opinion).