How Office Depot Pushes Service Plans On Customers

Harry writes "I was amused, appalled, and angry — yes, all three — when I spotted signs above every register at my local Office Depot with handy scripts for clerks to use in 'recommending' that customers buy extra-cost, extremely profitable protection plans. And now Laptop Magazine has posted an eye-opening investigative report that charges local Office Depot stores with instructing staffers to lie and tell people who want to buy laptops without service plans that they're out of stock." Update: 03/13 00:53 GMT by T : An employee with Office Depot, somewhere in the southeastern US, wrote to respond to this story as a employee of the company, but in his off time and not in any official capacity: "I will only say that what is described in your article and the Laptop Mag article is not something that occurs across the entire company as sanctioned or ordered by the Corporate Higher Ups and is certainly nothing I have experienced as a 10-year employee of the company, we want sales. Yes, we want add-ons, but we will take the sales regardless."

Comments

Re:Better Question

[The_Rook]

a little while ago you could have said the same about circuit city. and now, oh...

Well, that's one problem I won't have

[istartedi]

I found one vintage keyboard model that I like, and I've stuck with it, accumulating them when they come up on eBay and various other places. The one I'm typing on now has dual English-Japanese key caps on it which, IMHO, is cool and different. I have to use an AT to PS2 converter, which I plug into a PS2 to USB converter. If anything supersedes USB (doesn't seem likely) it might get really ugly though. If it weren't for the fact that most old equipment uses more power than new equipment I'd probably get everything refurb. Yeah... guys like me killed the consumer driven economy. Sorry 'bout that, oops! My bad. Now, let's see if this gets attached to the proper thread. Somehow my original reply got attached to the next comment after yours...