Friday, July 31, 2009

What A Rip-off!

Well, the TV repair place did NOT call back after a couple of hours, so I called them back again.
They are in San Jose. The girl I spoke with was a real ditz. Sounded like she was about 17 years old. Anyway, she starts asking me all of these questions that made no sense. I had already given her my name, address, etc. and the model and serial numbers of the TV. I told her what the problem was even though I told her I had just been on the phone with a Vizio technician who diagnosed that it was the tuner. She then asked me if the TV was on the wall or on a table and asked me if the LCD "Vizio" light on it was lit. I said "No, because the TV is not turned on". I asked her what difference did it make if it was on or off and she said she needed to know the color of the LCD "Vizio" light. She just giggled and said she needed to put it down on the paperwork. Sounded strange to me. So I asked her if they charged a service fee just to look at the TV and she said yes it was a $125 diagnostic fee. Then she told me that we would have to pack the TV up and send it to them in San Jose, which we'd have to pay for up front ourselves. She then told me the "flat rate" for service (above the $125) would include service (labor), parts and shipping it back to us and that the "flat rate" was $250. So now it's $125, plus the $150, plus about $30 to ship it to them, so that's like $305 just to have it fixed. Hell, we only paid $500 for the TV including tax and recycling fee. I told her to forget it.
So since we only use that TV about 2 hours a day (watching the news in the morning), we decided to just leave it as is. If anything else goes wrong with it, then we'll buy a new TV.
I'll bet I could find a local TV repairman around Canyon Country who could fix it for less than that, but to heck with it. We use the big 47" the most.

1 comment:

  1. I hear that all the time. With things that we have had to get fixed in the past, it's always been so expensive we ended up getting something new eventually. Easier and it all evens out prize-wise. A bit ridiculous isn't it?

    ReplyDelete

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Kay