Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Others Fined Over Digital TV Notices

Ian Lamont writes "The FCC has fined 11 retailers and television manufacturers for violating rules relating to the 2009 digital TV transition. Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Sears, Kmart, and Wal-Mart supposedly failed to place notices near analog-only TV sets warning customers that the sets did not have digital tuners. In part, the required notice reads: 'This television receiver has only an analog broadcast tuner and will require a converter box after February 17, 2009, to receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna because of the Nation's transition to digital broadcasting. Analog-only TVs should continue to work as before with cable and satellite TV services, gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players, and similar products.' The fines total $6.6 million."

Comments

Thrift store TVs

[Megane]

Goodwill and oter thrift stores (and maybe even pawn shops) better hope they don't get noticed for not putting the notice on the TVs themselves. I know that Goodwill has just been sticking up the notice in a random place on the wall or something. And right now thrift stores and pawn shops are probably the main place to find analog-only TV sets. But hey, as long as they have a video input, they're still useful for video games. And they will still work with an external tuner.

On the other hand, I've gotten two satellite tuners with ATSC at thrift stores for ten bucks each. One even had a broken analog NTSC tuner, which I found amusing. Unfortunately I wasted another ten bucks because I didn't realize that the DirecTV H10 and H20 require a satellite subscription to receive ATSC. Bargain hunters, stay away from those two models!

Wal*Mart: looked OK to me

[dpbsmith]

I dislike Wal*Mart. And if they were fined I'm sure they deserved it.

But my personal experience is that I've only seen those notices twice within the last year, and both times were in Wal*Marts. One was in Wisconsin, late last summer; the other in Massachusetts. I didn't see any notices at all when I was recently in Best Buy.

And: the day I received my converter coupons in the mail, which was February 29th--I must have been among the very first to get them--I called Wal*Mart to see if they had converter boxes; they said yes, I got there and they had a huge display of them in a featured location in the aisle just outside their electronics department, the pre-coupon price was $50, and they were ready and happy to process my $40 coupons.

Based on my highly scientific sample size of two, I don't see any indication that Wal*Mart is dragging its feet. Offhand I'd think they're making a good-faith effort to comply. If they haven't been getting the notices up I'd attribute it to general chaos and cluelessness, not to any systematic attempt to unload analog sets on unsuspecting customers.