Overdressed

Chapter One: The Coffeemaker
I travel to St. Louis to visit my friend, and she serves me really yummy coffee from this pod coffeemaker. It is a very enjoyable discovery as I have heretofore been able to only enjoy lattes and not regular drip coffee.

Chapter Two: My Coffeemaker
I come home, and decide I can save a lot of money at Starbucks if I purchase myself one of these coffeemakers. Whilst doing my regular Super Target shopping, I purchase the coffeemaker (~$60) as well as several bags of the "pod" coffee. I throw away the box as well as the receipt.

Chapter Three: My Defective Coffeemaker
Two weeks after I buy the coffeemaker, it stops working. Lights blink but no coffee makes. I call the 800-number in the owners manual. She takes tons of information from me - everything short of my SSN which I have enough sense not to give out. Then she tells me that my coffeemaker is defective and I can do one of two things:
1) take it back to the store where I purchased it
OR
2) cut off the bottom 4 inches of the cord, send it in to them, along with a check or money order for $10 to cover shipping and handling, and they'll send me a replacement! She said to make sure and put the transaction number (which she provided me) on my check.

Well, I don't really think that Target's going to take it back without the box OR a receipt, but Big Daddy made a big stink about paying another $10 for a product when it wasn't OUR fault that the damn thing didn't work.

Chapter Four: Target Says NO
I make Big Daddy go to Target with me to try & return it because he's much more forceful than I am. But, as I suspected, without either the original packaging or the receipt they wouldn't take it. Even though all we wanted to do was exchange it. I thought there was a chance they would at least let us exchange it. I guess they've tightened up their exchange policy these days. We go without coffee for several days.

Chapter Five: I RULE!!
Enough of this shit. I go to Target and buy a new coffeemaker. Now I have a box AND a receipt. I take it home, put it out on the counter, and put the old, broken one in the new, perfect one's box. A couple days later, I return the old one and get my $60 back. There's more than one way to exchange a coffeemaker, yo.

Chapter Six: More Coffeemakers
I get an email from a company called Fox International that says, "Your package was shipped on 2006-04-20 via R P S. Delivery is expected within 1-5 days. The tracking number is 012346789. Thank you for the order."

So I kindly email back, "yeah, I have a question....what did I order from you????"

And they email me again, "This is a warranty replacement Black & Decker coffee maker. Thank you."

So apparently, even though I never sent in my cord or the $10 check, they had my mailing address and were sending the replacement anyway! Rock on. I didn't mention it to anyone here, nor did I respond to the email.

Chapter Seven: A Regular Glut of Coffeemakers
My Kid brings in a box and says, "Why'd we get a new coffeemaker?"

And I'm all, "Dude, they sent us a replacement!!" I offer to take it back to Target and get yet another refund (equals free coffeemaker!) but Big Daddy said, "Just keep it; eventually the one we have will break, too." which I doubt, but OK.

The End
(so far)

Posted by Kalisa on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 at 2:57 PM | Permalink