Best Buy and defective product sales
I was in Best Buy this weekend. This was the second trip on a $100 gift card that was burning a whole in my pocket. My generous friend treated me to the gift card for Christmas after I helped him with his website earlier in the year.
With me I brought my youngest son Marco. Marco wanted to get some kind of bear movie since he was obsessed with bears lately. I figure I would look into getting some old sci-fi movies, hopefully at a discount price.
After finding “Brother Bear 2”, I came across a widescreen copy of Steven Speilberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds for $9.99. That didn’t seem right but at that price I simply didn’t think. I also picked up a 2–pack of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them, two classics from the “atomic age” for another $9.99.
Back to War of the Worlds.
When I got home, I later popped in the Worlds disc and noticed that it didn’t play. I popped out the disc and saw some huge surface defects on the bottom of the disc! Holy cow, no wonder the disc was so cheap. How annoying! There was no indication on the disc, other than the price, that this was a defective product.
My first instinct would be to march back to Best Buy and complain, perhaps demand a “real” disc but that would have been such a hassle. A hassle that I’m sure the Best Buy folks are betting on. How infuriating!
In the end, I have a DVD/CD Repair unit from Aleratec which I used to scrub off a few layers of plastic to fully restore the disc. After 4–5 treatments, the disc worked like “new”. The scratches were totally gone and the disc played perfectly.
Now the $50 repair unit effectively gets cheaper with every disc I repair. In this case, I saved $10 for repairing the defective Worlds DVD. I guess I can start looking for these faulty discount discs as a strategy to save money in the future.
But still, this is a totally offensive tactic and I’m left just shaking my head.