bopo.net

As you may or may not have heard, the 46″ Samsung DLP that I bought a little over two years ago from the online arm of a “big box” retail electronics concern died a couple weeks ago. For simplicity’s sake, lets call them “BB”. I had a service plan, so eventually a BB tech came out and had a look at it. He said a couple circuit boards were toast, and he’d order replacements and fix it. The process was expected to take a couple weeks, so that sucked. He called a couple days later and said that it turned out to be cost prohibitive for them to fix it, so we’d be getting a replacement TV. He gave me a claim number which was good for a new TV. Yay.

Last Monday, Miyuki and I went to the BB in Evanston. After looking me up in their system, they said they’d be willing to give us a 50″ DLP in exchange (no one makes 46″ DLP’s anymore). I pointed out that I spent quite a bit of money a couple years ago on a 46″ DLP, so I’d rather they give us a 46″ LCD, which was much closer to what I paid back then, but was still cheaper by a few hundred dollars. They said they couldn’t do that, as they have to match TVs on a feature-to-feature basis and not cost or size, and the value of the old TV had depreciated over the past couple years anyways. They would also be willing to give a credit equal to the cost of a DLP towards an LCD. (The latter of which was presented as a very magnanimous solution.) I called the service plan hotline and they confirmed those policies¹, so I went with a 50″ Samsung DLP because the credit would have only covered about 2/3 of the cost of the LCD.

I don’t know if this is what inevitably happens when you try to cram a state name, two dates, a graphic and two mottos (one of which contains an eleven-letter word) on the back of a quarter, but wow.