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When call wait times are in the hours and your phone support staff are working shorter hours, making customers call to cancel things or request refunds within refund periods is basically theft.
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In 2000, I was buying a Dell laptop and 2 things went wrong at once: the laptop was faulty, and they shipped it to Japan by accident so it took 2 weeks to get to me. By the time I got it and encountered the fault, it was past 15 day return period and they refused to take it back.
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It was a mitigatable problem (a chip on the motherboard had a tendency to come unseated in that model, and you had to push down on a part of the keyboard to reseat it) but not repairable, since it was a design flaw. And not covered under warranty either.
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So fortunately, I just had a crappy experience for a couple of years. I never bought a Dell laptop again, though I did buy a Dell desktop (my last one) in 2008.
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But the experience sensitized me to the effects of things like customer service response times. Right now, a lot of people are going to be giving up on waiting on hold for things and just eating the costs of a lot of shit they don't want.
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I actually kinda prefer "all sales are final/no refund" type policies. At least you know what you're getting into instead of "60 day return policy" that's really "if you're willing to endure 20 minutes on an ooga-booga website to find a number and then wait on hold for 3 hours"
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You didn't just charge it back on the card? Warranty periods are supposed to begin when the customer is given control of the product. Unless you handled the shipping logistics, you were due a refund
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That is so awful. Counter example: I bought an Apple product way way back in Jan 2020. Took it back, they said you can’t return this after 14 days, I said it took 6 of those to even get to me! And...they were good humans and said oops here’s your refund.
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My iMac's HD quit at the beginning of February, and due to a lot of delays and various complexities, I panicked & mistakenly got an underpowered replacement the day the lockdowns went in force. I can't refund/replace until a general startup begins. It's an extra layer of hell.
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