I’ve known numerous people who have worked there as well as many people who benefitted or got f***** by their warranties.My story is as follows. Basically way back when, my mom bought me a creative nomad for xmas. She got the warranty for it. Now… don’t even get me started on creatives faulty products, people make a big stink about xbox 360 but creative has to be the worst. Never met a person whose creative mp3 player didn’t break for a no good reason, and I’ve had my first one replaced 4x and my 2nd one replaced twice before I got an ipod. The ipod actually works great.

Anyways getting back to the point. She got me the mp3 player, I replaced it many times due to its defects during the period that it was under the factory warranty. Then one day a month or so after said warranty when I was on my 2nd model and replaced it already twice, the stupid hard drive of all things stopped working. Now, this was during the early era of hard drive mp3 players, and in the past, one time a button jammed, all the other times the headphone jack broke. Creative makes some really shitty products, I expected the headphone jack to break after the 2nd time so you can imagine I was more careful with the mp3 player and tried to not take out my headphones from the jack as much as possible to reduce ware and tear. Anyways again getting back on topic, I tried to return it once it was only under future shops extended warranty and guess what, they claimed it was physical damage and refused to honor their warranty which I was told in store that I could break it on purpose if I wanted to and they would still honor this warranty. It was supposed to be a replacement warranty and like many others have said, my mom only got the warranty papers after the purchase which outlined “physical damage” aka “etc” for some people depending on their purchase. Each one of their so-called warranties has a general term that basically allows them to refuse to service any product. So they flat out refused and I went home very pissed off cause at the time I didn’t have a car and took the bus there, they basically just wasted my time, I didn’t even have an mp3 player to listen to on the way there. I asked them, “physical damage? what other type of f****** damage could there be, the only thing that would cause an electronic devise to NOT work IS something physical, it isn’t going to stop working out of mental anguish”. The clerk just shrugged at me and said “Sorry, we don’t fix/replace physical damage items”.

So I left, went home, and told my mom the story of what happened. The very next day, my mom took me to futureshop. We waited in line, got to the front of the line and she argued with the clerk for about 10 mins and then finally she had enough and told the clerk she wanted to speak to a manager. The clerk tried to say the manager will tell us the same thing and that they are too busy to come, we told her we’d wait. She served a few other people and nearly 30 minutes passed, we asked again, call the fucking manager to the front please. At this point my mom was getting really fucking pissed off. She basically told them that she wasn’t going to serve another fucking person until we had been served BY a manager.

So finally 30-35 minutes pass and we’re really holding them up and people are really starting to bitch, but not against us, in our favor. The people in line actually agreed with what we were saying lmao. So then this asshole manager comes down and starts arguing. The guy was rude and had a huge ego you could just tell. After literally another 20 minutes of non-stop arguing about how their warranty is a scam etc, my mom actually convinced the guy after like 2 years of many broken mp3 players and replacements, to give us the entirity of our money back for their shotty product which they refused to service under their warranty. I don’t know how she did it, but if you’re persistent, make a scene, cause others to see what they are doing, they try to get rid of you. Try it sometime, just flat out refuse to leave and start throwing around words like “Scam”, “warranty not being honored”, “scam company”, “going to go to the local newspaper about this”, etc. Hell if you have to even lie to them and say that your “uncle” is a critic for your local paper and you’re going to have them slammed in the media, do whatever you have to, say whatever you have to say, and put your foot down and refuse to leave. Then the other clients in line won’t be able to be served and it causes them to look even worse. Got the 400$ + 60$ tax(i live in quebec) for my nomad mp3 player back after like 2 years. They refused to give us the $ back on the warranty though but we just took the money and walked, f***the 60$ warranty, I had an mp3 player off and on for about 2 years and all the times before that it was replaced immediately, so I’m not going to complain.

Getting on to part two of my complain against futureshop. I’ve known tons of people that have worked for futureshop even some who still do. I’ve known people who worked in three different ones around here. All of them have told me flat out that the managers really pressure them to lie about the warranties and tell the customer whatever it is you have to tell them to get them to accept the warranty and that they’ll deal with the customer later if there is a problem. Most people give up and walk out having been scammed. The trick is to know how to use the warranty and nobody knows this better than a futureshop employee who sees the angry customers that DO get their way on a daily basis compared to those who do NOT.

You’ve gotta be calm but logical and refuse to leave until you get your warranty honored. You cannot back down, and the older you are the more likely they’ll give in to your demand of them honoring your warranty. You need to make them look bad infront of the other people in line as well as those surrounding. They’ll give in just to save face infront of all the people you’re complaining infront of.

They are a bullshit company and they downright fraud people. Their markups are enormous. I’ve been in the computer business my entire life, I know places like microbytes are terrible but look at futureshop, their markups are insane, they charge like 200$ for something that costs them like 45$. They’re preying on the fact that if you’re going there to buy electronics, then you’re stupid for going there in the first place and therefore they can charge whatever they want to charge. (No offense to anybody here, but they work via a customer is always an idiot mentality)

They charge like 50$ to install a dvdrom, 35$ to install ram, all of this a normal company would charge you like max 100$ to assemble an entire PC. Their computer people are f***** idiots too, they know nothing, they aren’t even computer specialists they’re just people they hired off the street and trained. The only people who seem to know what the fuck they are doing are the ones who install car audio and even then my buddy could do a better job of it most of the time. They prey on the non-technologically advanced like people my grand parents age or people from my parents generation who never really got into technology.

They’re a pathetic ass company and their computers are mostly worthless and not worth the price, or good but overpriced, and the same can be said for most of their products. Either you get boned on the quality and the price or just the price when it comes to futureshop.

I understand they need to make money, but they’re just downright greedy. And for them to act like it’s a favor to not charge you any hourly or quarter hourly wage for installing ram or a dvdrom or even assembling a PC entirely is LAUGHABLE. Look 50$ to install a dvd-rom that takes literally 2-3 minutes to do, compared to a quarter hour charge at a technicians rate of 60$/hour. Hrmm do the math, heck even if is minimum 1 hour you’d be saving money cause you could have them build your entire pc or put more then one part in.

This company is just down right despicable and doesn’t even deserve the customers they have. They lied on boxing day in my area just to drive more people to the store. They had sales on ps3/360/wii’s but when even the first people entered the store, there weren’t any to be found, so they basically made an advertisement stating that PS3 would be say… 50$ cheaper then normal price but there weren’t any in stock to begin with, or at least, they purposely didn’t stock any.

(I moved this to the front page the original can be found here http://futureshopsucks.com/?p=55#comments )
Admin

Posted by Admin on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 3:11 am.