Complaint Review: Best Buy

We have never been so unhappy with a company and are not the type of people to normally post a complaint, but we've been pushed to the limit with Best Buy! We purchased a VPR MATRIX computer (Best Buy's own brand) for our son for a high school graduation present in June. He set it up the end of June and soon after (about a week or two later) found that it had quit working. It would shut itself off and try to reboot every 30 seconds...over and over.

The ONLY reason we had decided to purchase the IN-HOME warranty was so that if our son had trouble with the computer at college he could get a repair person to come to his dorm (as he would be without a car).

During July my older son called the service technician several times and they walked him through cleaning off the software and running a restore disk. After doing this a few times without fixing the problem, they determined the problem must not be software related. They then sent over a service technician who actually came over twice. The first time to put in a new chip, the second time a new motherboard and different chip. Still no change. The next technician (3rd visit..now early Sepember and new technician) tried to see if it was a memory problem. When she left and the recovery disk completed it's run, the problem was still unchanged.. the computer wouldn't work.

We then called again to say we wanted either our money back or a new computer. (We were told by the Best Buy saleman when we purchased the warranty that if we had them come out to repair it three times, on the fourth attempt we could request a replacement--under their lemon-law.) We were told our case would be sent in for "review". Two weeks later we still hadn't heard from them so we called and were then told that we had been turned down for their lemon law replacement as their warranty states:

"After three service repairs have been completed on an individual product and that individual product requires a fourth repair, as determined by us, we will replace it with a product of comparable performance..."

By now I had contacted John in "Customer Service" - I use the term loosely- at their main office...not the service technician line. I was told that it states "three service repairs HAVE BEEN COMPLETED on an individual product.." and our computer had never been repaired for the problem...so we had yet to still have the FIRST repair COMPLETED. I asked what would happen if they could never fix it, or how long we had to wait til they decided it was too many repair attempts... He said it was out of his hands, he didn't know. He then told me to hold and the next thing I knew he had transferred me to the service technician center in Florida, where I was now told that they decided it must be a software problem -- which wasn't covered under warranty. We paid $1030.00 for a computer with warranty that we've never been able to use. If only there was ONE person there that believed in customer service!

All we can do is post this warning to others -- our WORST BUY ever was at BEST BUY! Don't buy anything from them!

Sue
Portland, Oregon