Tomorrow is Free Cone Day at participating Ben and Jerry’s 12-8pm.
http://www.benjerry.com/scoop-shops/scoop-shop-locator/
Starbucks is offering a free pastry with the purchase of a drink until 10:30am, but you’ll need the coupon from here:
http://assets.starbucks.com/assets/1ac43f0b737a4b778Ba9c80ee14715ec.jpg
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So here’s a little quiz for you. Read these four scenarios and figure out which one is a genuine rip-off.
A. You are at work and the siren call of saturated fat hits you. You hoof it down to the nearest McD’s and order a Quarter Pounder value meal. You open the bag at your office, you realize your french fries aren’t in there. When you call the store to complain, they offer to replace your meal for free.
B. You are at Target and see an adorable place mat on an endcap and there’s the telltale orange clearance tag on two of the price tags. You grab four. When you get to the front, the cashier rings up your purchase but calls over her manager because your place mat rang up as socks. The manager says she’s sorry, but some unscrupulous customer tried to switch the tags and put the items in the wrong section. She says she’ll give you the first one for the price on the switched tag, but the rest will be full price like they’re supposed to be.
C. You are returning an ugly sweater that you got as a gift. The CSR asks you for your receipt, but you don’t have it. The CSR apologizes profusely, but points to the big sign behind her that says she can’t process a return without one. After several minutes of you complaining, the manager comes over and offers to give you store credit for the current sale price, just to get you out of the store. This isn’t going to to do you any good because you wouldn’t shop in the store, anyway.
D. Your coffee machine starts spewing water all over the kitchen counter. You call up the number on your instruction manual to get a replacement, but your warranty expired 3 weeks ago. No amount of pleading or threatening to speak to a supervisor will get them to make an exception.
The answer, of course, is E: None of the Above.
I’m sick of people whining about ripoffs which, frankly, aren’t ripoffs. Employee human error (assuming the company works to correct it) and disclosed, reasonable company policies that you just don’t like are NOT ripoffs.
It’s your responsibility as a consumer to make sure you are aware of return policies, shipping charges, warranties, etc. Occasionally you run into a company with truly illegal policies or outright scams, but the vast majority of ‘ripoffs’ could be avoided if the customer didn’t have their heads in their behinds.
If you’re not sure that ‘Final Sale’ item will fit, don’t buy it. If the return policy says you need a receipt, then keep your receipt. If your warranty is for 90 days and it is now day 109, you’re so out of luck. Save your outrage for real corporate abuses.
Have you ever been truly ripped off by a company?
We’ve been fortunate so far. While we’ve had some really crappy situations with some companies (see the Lowe’s Disaster), we usually have our wits about us and refuse to do business if we smell something fishy.
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Mr and I spent well over $2,000 this weekend. There were no frivolous purchases and we have more than enough to cover them, but we’re both still feeling the sticker shock.
I hate the guilty feeling you get when you buy something big. In this case it was a very good quality kitchen table set and Mr’s glasses (we have vision insurance, but it’s made of fail and rabies) plus smaller purchases at Lowes and the grocery store. All were needed items and the table was ‘the one’ that we’ve been looking for since we knew our roommate was moving out, but I’ve still got that ‘what did you do?!?’ feeling.
I think it’s partially because we didn’t do a good job haggling for the table. I’m too big and too tired to deal with that BS right now. We ended up getting free delivery, which wasn’t too bad, but I have a sneaking suspicion we could have gotten another $200 knocked off it we were really willing to play hardball. The problem was that we weren’t wiling to walk away from the purchase since we’ve been looking for a table for over a year with no luck. Salespeople can tell when they’ve got you buy the metaphorical cojones.
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I just bought the new Ace Attorney Game for the DS:Â Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth but I won’t let myself play it until I go into Early Labor so I have something to try and distract myself with (and so I have something else to do in the hospital besides take care of LO). It’s driving me absolutely batty.
I Love It This Much
I love, love, love the Ace Attorney/Phoenix Wright series. If you are a DS owner and you haven’t played them, you really should. If you like visual novels or the old school point and click adventures (illogical puzzles and all), then you’ll probably like this series. Also, sorry for the TVTropes link there. If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend the next couple of ours with a million tabs open trying to read everything. (To be honest, I have 3 tropes tabs open already. There goes my productivity for the day.)
In less awesome news, I’m currently disgruntled with Ubisoft for making it you can’t play Assassin’s Creed 2 on the PC unless you’re connected to the internet. No, I don’t have it, but that kind of idiotic DRM makes me angry. I’m a firm believer that if I bought something, it is mine and I should be able to do whatever the hell I want with it, short of copying it and selling copies to other people. Apparently Ubisoft has never heard of things like internet outages.
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If you didn’t know already, I’m a hard core Nintendo Fan Girl. How hard core? Well, you’re likely to find me wandering around geek conventions dressed as various Nintendo characters. That kind of level of dedication. So for me to say that I’m unhappy with Nintendo is akin to me announcing that I don’t like food anymore. It just doesn’t happen.
Until now.
50lbs ago...
My DSlite has died. Or more accurately, Mr’s DSlite has died. I had the original DS but played it to death by using it 3-4 hours a day between classes and on the bus back and forth to PSU. Then I started on Mr’s DSlite and it lasted a lot longer because it was a better build and an improvement on the original. I had my eyes on getting a DSi for my birthday in April until I learned of one little fact.
The DSi isn’t backwards compatible with GBA games.
What the hell, Nintendo?
I loved my DS because I could buy up the older GBA games used. We got a ton of really good games (Metroid Fusion, Castlevania Aria of Sorrow, etc) for the system for dirt cheap, but I sold my GBA a few weeks after I got it because the screen was too darn hard to see.
Now I’m looking around for a new DSlite instead of jumping on the new technology because Nintendo apparently decided backwards compatibility isn’t cool anymore. They even came out with a larger DSi (supposedly for older players who have trouble with the screen) and there was still no room for the GBA slot. Gah!
So, when you buy a new system, is backwards compatibility important?
Way back when, the leaps in technology were so huge that nothing was backwards compatible. You know the different Atari systems weren’t going to play each others games or that the SNES wasn’t going to play regular NES games because the cartridges were so different. Now that we’ve entered the world of discs, things are a little different.
We generally don’t get rid of our old systems until they completely die, but it’s still obnoxious to realize that once the old guy goes, you’ll have to track down and buy a new one. We actually got our new PS2 around the same time as our PS3 thanks to Sony deciding not to include compatibility.
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Many a geek has faced the unfortunate dilemma of having to decide between video games or their savings account. It can get really ugly if only one partner in a relationship is a gamer and the other doesn’t understand the appeal or thinks it’s a waste of money. The good news is that although gaming can be a very expensive hobby, it certainly doesn’t have to be.
- Examine the TRUE cost of your system. A lot of Wii owners found this one out the hard way when they realized that they had to buy all those remotes and nun-chucks. Before you buy a system, look into all the peripherals you’ll need (memory cards, controllers, cords, etc.)
- Don’t be a system whore. You don’t really need to own every system ever, even if it means that you don’t get to play all the latest releases. Pick a system that suits your gaming needs (Wii for playing with real life friends, XBox for online Halo addicts, etc) and stick with it.
- Just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it’s worth it. The crappy $10-20 games are usually referred to as ‘shovelware’ within the industry. You know these games, they’re in the ‘bargain bin’ and they’re made by companies you’ve never heard of and they’re usually knocks off of 1st party manufacturers. Same thing goes for cheap 3rd party accessories. They may be cheap, but they tend to break long before the original manufacturers stuff.
- Branded is not always better. Nintendo branded SD cards for the Wii are 3-4 times more expensive than regular SD cards. Both work just fine in the system. Same thing goes for headsets and other peripherals. Do a little research online and see what does and does not need to be an ‘officially licensed’ product.
- Get used to the idea of buying used or older games. The world is full of people who rush out to buy the newest games at the cost of selling off their older ones. You could rush out and buy the latest games the day they’re out, or you could wait a few weeks until the initial run is over and the price drops or you can find it used. (Of course this doesn’t work so well for online multi-player games.)
- Work the online market. You’ll get more money for selling used games and be able to buy cheaper if you skip Gamestop and use a service like the Amazon Marketplace or Ebay to buy and sell. It’s a little bit more work, but it’s less disappointing that getting $5 for the $60 game you bought last week.
- Make gamer friends. I don’t mean the online kind, I mean the kind you can actually sit down on the couch with and play a game with. Or, more importantly, that you can meet and swap games with. Despite the industry making noise about re-playability, you will only play through most games once. You could sell these games, but you’ll get more value by swapping them for ‘new’ games from your friends.
- Consider renting. Renting is best for those with high turnovers. A service like Gamefly is great and cheaper than buying if you get and return a game every few days. If you’re the type, like me, who wants to keep and play the game for a month or two at a time, it’s not as good a value.
Can you find Mama Geek in this mess?
Got any tips for keeping the cost of being a gaming geek down?
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This, my friends, is my berserk button. Head on over to Consumerist, if you will, to read this post on some guy who canceled his Cox account over a Playstation 3 promotion that he wasn’t supposed to get anyway.
This is a glorious example of what NOT to do. And to be fair, both parties are to blame here. Cox really dropped the ball on the promotion, but this guy is a whiny brat and bad consumer.
I’m not opposed to Christopher calling up and asking to get the promotion, because you never know unless you ask. However, once it became obvious that the promotion was supposed to be only for people who had and kept their promotional flyer (which Christopher never got) and that the CSR couldn’t give it to him, he should have stopped. This is like me going into the Walgreens, seeing the woman in front of me do one of those awesome string deals where they actually earn money and then demanding to get the same discount even though I hadn’t collected the appropriate coupons. It doesn’t work that way and harassing an employee over a policy they can’t break is obnoxious and counter-productive.
This is my favorite part:
I proceeded with the cancellation of my phone and broadband services. She offered the 10% off my bill, and kept upping the offer, but I made it crystal clear that it was because of the PS3. I’ve been a good customer for the last 11 years.
If the service rep was really offering him a bigger discount (let’s say 20%), then he would have had more than enough money to buy himself a PS3 AND he would have a continuing discount, which probably would have saved him even more money in the end. Having a temper tantrum rarely helps you make logical decisions.
In any case, Cox was in the wrong both for @#$%ing up the mailing of their flyers AND for making occasional exceptions. However, t hat doesn’t make it reasonable for a customers to call up and demand things they’re not really entitled to.
So, what do you think? Was Christopher being reasonable?
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Yup, I’m shilling Ebates again. Why? Because getting extra money back on things I was already going to buy is kind of awesome.
No direct links, just use the search function at Ebates to pull up the deals.
FTD – 14% back with some bouquets at 40-50% off. Personally, I prefer to deal with local florists directly, but sometimes it’s just easier to let one of these umbrella businesses deal with it.
ProFlowers – 10% back and bouquet deals.
Teleflora – 12% back.
1800Flowers – 12% back.
Godiva – 9% back. No coupons, sadly.
BareNecessities – 10% back and lots of sales/coupons. I’m actually very impressed with all the different sizes they carry. Definitely not cheap, but if you’re an unusual size or just looking for some special lingerie, it’s worth a shot.
Beauty.com – 8% back and coupons. They do carry men’s cologne as well as women’s products.
BestBathStore – 15% back.
AccessoryGeeks - 10% back and $10 off. For the geek in your life.
Hammacher Schlemmer – 6% back and $12 off of the The Marshmallow Shooting Shortbow. Ends 2/7 Now I totally want one.
BustedTees – 10% back. Pop culture and geek tees. Some are very ‘inappropriate’ so maybe don’t open this link in front of your mother-in-law.
Snapfish – 10% back and coupons. Good for parents and grandparents.
Shutterfly – 10% back and coupons.
Yes, it’s a referral link.
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