Righto... and by the time you actually go in to collect on your warranty, you've probably lost the receipt or didn't read the fine print in the warranty about exactly what IS covered. Nine times out of ten, instead of spending any cash on repairing the item, the'll just send the bad one back to the manufacturer as a defect and give you a new one out of their stock, effectively costing them around half the purchase price of the warranty (sometimes even less!) I know this for a fact because I asked. a manager explained it to me this was a while back) and even did the math for me. To say that extended warranties are a huge profit center is a HUGE understatement.:)
I've never seen a business (especially a large one) change their operating procedures just because they were causing the loss of sales or were pissing people off. I guess stranger things have happened, tho.
Didn't even occur to the moron that Best Buy DOES make a lot of money off those things; that's why they tell them to sell them so hard. I like how they try to *train* the associates on how to politely say that the merchandise is great buy WILL break after the manufacturer warranty runs out. Man, what it must be like to be the rich, corrupt asshole that makes that stuff up.
I guess that's a subtle clue that they're not honest with you by default... but they'll let you in on this juicy bit of information that's actually TRUE because you've put up with them thus far;)
I'll post this because it's not really legal advice but just stating a fact. Much like music, the video game companies sell copies of the game (at extremely inflated prices) that you can rent out. They cost in the $600-$1000 range. That's how the company makes money on a game that can be played by so many people.
I used to work at Staples when I was 16. I was the top seller of extended warranties. You know why I did it? Social experiment. I wanted to see how many people that seemed like intelligent individuals could be conned into purchasing something that should be given to them for free. Not surprisingly, almost all of them.
That's why these stores make such a big deal out of them; they can easily be sold by someone with the right determination and pitch, and they are extremely profitable. They are extrememly profitable in the short-term, while the long-term effect can be written off or modified as they see fit. Read the fine print:)
Secondly, I don't BUY a warranty. A warranty is the promise of protection against product defect. A warranty is something that should be provided. I don't BUY the ability of their product to work beyond a certain date. That's just ass-backwards.
I realize that you can rationalize it away however you want to make the corporations seem less evil for doing this, but the point still stands whether or not you try and figure out cleaver new verbage for it: A warranty is a warranty. You don't buy it; it's provided as a show of good faith and as a promise that the manufacturer will stand behind their products.
Now I'm pissed off just because I thought about this again. I still have the damned award I won for selling the most two months in a row. I keep it as a reminder to myself that people in the grand scheme are stupid, gullible, uninformed, and weak.
This is just my opinion. If you don't agree, ignore it.
It's not just in NC;) They've refused to sell to me and my father both before... strangely enough that guy got transferred to a store in the ghetto a few weeks later - no joke.
My father tried this already. He's found it impossible to do business with anyone because somewhere in EVERY company's paperwork, there's a caluse that allows them to share your information. Even if there's a separate entry that states they will not share it, it's overridden by another section (or whatever.) My father and I, through extensive testing, have discovered that the only lists that you can effectively opt-out of are the ones that drones gather as points of sale in stores (phone, email, address, etc.) Everything else is free game. Even then (as was the case with Radio Shack before they changed their info gathering techniques) some companies will refuse to proceed with a sale unless you provide them with this information.
See my earlier comment. Simple - they sell the address once they have it. So what if you opt-out of THEIR email list; the rest of the freaking world now has it. Man that pisses me off.
What does it matter if you opt-out of a mail list? Once you've opted in, the third party can then sell your address again and you then have NO way of tracking it around. Unless a system identical to the national "Do-Not-Call Registry" can be established for email addresses, there's not a damn thing you can do about spam in relation to opt-in/opt-out lists.
BS. I finished a 1-year contract for a fortune 10 company who, of course, farmed all coding out to India. They turned out nothing but crap that rendered the appservers useless due to infinite loops, memory leaks, and a plethora of newb errors. As much money was spent on on-shore people to fix those problems as was spent on the bad code itself, but no one ever actually LEARNED from this and had the on-shore guys just DO the coding. God that pisses me off.
A friend of mine took a small hard drive and installed a copy of Debian (methinks) on it. He then booted systems that needed work from the HD with the original slaved or on a separate controller. He could then use the appropriate FS tools/drivers to correct issues with the hard drive/filesystems, as well as test the stability of the processor and memory (gmake -j10 on a kernel source should do it.) You'll get various segfaults/panics for memory issues and processor issues.. can't remember exactly which segfaults equate to which errors, but it's a generalized test. This method also allows you to add new tools to the test image as they come out, rather than having to burn a new CD. I know burning a CD isn't a big deal, but when you want to add something new every week, it can become a pain. This method can also be used to test other hardware in the system, although we never actually had to do so. Most problems were limited to processor/memory/HD. This was at a PC rapair shop, BTW. The customers were always floored when they found out that there was this "gnu/linux thingie" that could actually do useful stuff.:)
I just saved off my XP EFS keys to a floppy. I'm going to hope they last long enough to save my ass. I've never relied on a floppy for anything, but just the other day I found a 3.25 with some BASIC programs on it that I wrote when I was 15. Kinda fun.
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Righto... and by the time you actually go in to collect on your warranty, you've probably lost the receipt or didn't read the fine print in the warranty about exactly what IS covered. Nine times out of ten, instead of spending any cash on repairing the item, the'll just send the bad one back to the manufacturer as a defect and give you a new one out of their stock, effectively costing them around half the purchase price of the warranty (sometimes even less!) :)
I know this for a fact because I asked. a manager explained it to me this was a while back) and even did the math for me. To say that extended warranties are a huge profit center is a HUGE understatement.
I've never seen a business (especially a large one) change their operating procedures just because they were causing the loss of sales or were pissing people off. I guess stranger things have happened, tho.
Didn't even occur to the moron that Best Buy DOES make a lot of money off those things; that's why they tell them to sell them so hard. I like how they try to *train* the associates on how to politely say that the merchandise is great buy WILL break after the manufacturer warranty runs out. Man, what it must be like to be the rich, corrupt asshole that makes that stuff up.
I guess that's a subtle clue that they're not honest with you by default... but they'll let you in on this juicy bit of information that's actually TRUE because you've put up with them thus far ;)
I'll post this because it's not really legal advice but just stating a fact.
Much like music, the video game companies sell copies of the game (at extremely inflated prices) that you can rent out. They cost in the $600-$1000 range. That's how the company makes money on a game that can be played by so many people.
You've officially earned yourself a blacklist. I'll never buy anything from your store again. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I used to work at Staples when I was 16. I was the top seller of extended warranties. You know why I did it? Social experiment. I wanted to see how many people that seemed like intelligent individuals could be conned into purchasing something that should be given to them for free. Not surprisingly, almost all of them. That's why these stores make such a big deal out of them; they can easily be sold by someone with the right determination and pitch, and they are extremely profitable. They are extrememly profitable in the short-term, while the long-term effect can be written off or modified as they see fit. Read the fine print :)
Secondly, I don't BUY a warranty. A warranty is the promise of protection against product defect. A warranty is something that should be provided. I don't BUY the ability of their product to work beyond a certain date. That's just ass-backwards.
I realize that you can rationalize it away however you want to make the corporations seem less evil for doing this, but the point still stands whether or not you try and figure out cleaver new verbage for it: A warranty is a warranty. You don't buy it; it's provided as a show of good faith and as a promise that the manufacturer will stand behind their products.
Now I'm pissed off just because I thought about this again. I still have the damned award I won for selling the most two months in a row. I keep it as a reminder to myself that people in the grand scheme are stupid, gullible, uninformed, and weak.
This is just my opinion. If you don't agree, ignore it.
Of course I'd be interested. I assume you mean dedicating time and energy. Unemployment=broke=can't help financially.
I wonder who else would be...
It's not just in NC ;)
They've refused to sell to me and my father both before... strangely enough that guy got transferred to a store in the ghetto a few weeks later - no joke.
The law says they have to have an opt-out method... not that it has to work ;)
Well there's really only one solution... Trace and execute. I'm talking ultra-bloody here, people. :)
I can only hope you're right!
I was referrin' to the average Joe, but point taken.
My father tried this already. He's found it impossible to do business with anyone because somewhere in EVERY company's paperwork, there's a caluse that allows them to share your information. Even if there's a separate entry that states they will not share it, it's overridden by another section (or whatever.)
My father and I, through extensive testing, have discovered that the only lists that you can effectively opt-out of are the ones that drones gather as points of sale in stores (phone, email, address, etc.) Everything else is free game.
Even then (as was the case with Radio Shack before they changed their info gathering techniques) some companies will refuse to proceed with a sale unless you provide them with this information.
See my earlier comment. Simple - they sell the address once they have it. So what if you opt-out of THEIR email list; the rest of the freaking world now has it.
Man that pisses me off.
What does it matter if you opt-out of a mail list?
Once you've opted in, the third party can then sell your address again and you then have NO way of tracking it around.
Unless a system identical to the national "Do-Not-Call Registry" can be established for email addresses, there's not a damn thing you can do about spam in relation to opt-in/opt-out lists.
Not even the companies... See my reply to the above.
BS.
I finished a 1-year contract for a fortune 10 company who, of course, farmed all coding out to India. They turned out nothing but crap that rendered the appservers useless due to infinite loops, memory leaks, and a plethora of newb errors.
As much money was spent on on-shore people to fix those problems as was spent on the bad code itself, but no one ever actually LEARNED from this and had the on-shore guys just DO the coding.
God that pisses me off.
Humor, my friend... Humor.
Whoops! Almost forgot to mention the fact that it could be used to back up vital customer data on a failing system. Can't do that with a CD! :)
A friend of mine took a small hard drive and installed a copy of Debian (methinks) on it. He then booted systems that needed work from the HD with the original slaved or on a separate controller. He could then use the appropriate FS tools/drivers to correct issues with the hard drive/filesystems, as well as test the stability of the processor and memory (gmake -j10 on a kernel source should do it.) You'll get various segfaults/panics for memory issues and processor issues.. can't remember exactly which segfaults equate to which errors, but it's a generalized test. This method also allows you to add new tools to the test image as they come out, rather than having to burn a new CD. I know burning a CD isn't a big deal, but when you want to add something new every week, it can become a pain. :)
This method can also be used to test other hardware in the system, although we never actually had to do so. Most problems were limited to processor/memory/HD.
This was at a PC rapair shop, BTW. The customers were always floored when they found out that there was this "gnu/linux thingie" that could actually do useful stuff.
I just saved off my XP EFS keys to a floppy. I'm going to hope they last long enough to save my ass. I've never relied on a floppy for anything, but just the other day I found a 3.25 with some BASIC programs on it that I wrote when I was 15. Kinda fun.
I must ask you then... why was it called the Disk of Impending Doom? It sounds like it was a great little guy :)
If that works, I'm going to introduce a new detergent called "Tyde"
Don't forget to mention that somewhere in there, you were Windowing and your computer froze for no apparent reason.