Complaint Review: Walmart Store #5054 - Jacksonville Florida

A person has a broken down IBM Thinkpad. He purchases a new Acer laptop at his local Wal-Mart. He takes the Acer home, pulls the new laptop and accessories out of the box, and then puts the Thinkpad in the box, along with some other old components he has lying around. Then he returns to Wal-Mart with the old junk inside the Acer box and tells the know-nothing minimum-wage employee working the return counter that he has decided against the Acer. The totally clueless employee opens the box and sees a laptop and other accessories inside. The customer is refunded his money and the broken Thinkpad in the Acer box goes back on the shelf. The customer now has a brand new Acer laptop and all of his money. Eventually some poor sucker will get stuck with a Thinkpad in an Acer box and everyone will accuse HIM of trying to pull a fast one. Suggestion to Frank: File a police report and have them find out who the Thinkpad was registered to.

A person has a broken down IBM Thinkpad. He purchases a new Acer laptop at his local Wal-Mart. He takes the Acer home, pulls the new laptop and accessories out of the box, and then puts the Thinkpad in the box, along with some other old components he has lying around. Then he returns to Wal-Mart with the old junk inside the Acer box and tells the know-nothing minimum-wage employee working the return counter that he has decided against the Acer. The totally clueless employee opens the box and sees a laptop and other accessories inside. The customer is refunded his money and the broken Thinkpad in the Acer box goes back on the shelf. The customer now has a brand new Acer laptop and all of his money. Eventually some poor sucker will get stuck with a Thinkpad in an Acer box and everyone will accuse HIM of trying to pull a fast one. Suggestion to Frank: File a police report and have them find out who the Thinkpad was registered to.

A person has a broken down IBM Thinkpad. He purchases a new Acer laptop at his local Wal-Mart. He takes the Acer home, pulls the new laptop and accessories out of the box, and then puts the Thinkpad in the box, along with some other old components he has lying around. Then he returns to Wal-Mart with the old junk inside the Acer box and tells the know-nothing minimum-wage employee working the return counter that he has decided against the Acer. The totally clueless employee opens the box and sees a laptop and other accessories inside. The customer is refunded his money and the broken Thinkpad in the Acer box goes back on the shelf. The customer now has a brand new Acer laptop and all of his money. Eventually some poor sucker will get stuck with a Thinkpad in an Acer box and everyone will accuse HIM of trying to pull a fast one. Suggestion to Frank: File a police report and have them find out who the Thinkpad was registered to.

This story does not sound right. I have purchased two laptop computers in my life, a refurbished HP 17" DV9000 from a reseller merchant off of eBay, (on which I am currently using to write this comment) and a new IBM ThinkPad from Fry's Electronics, and I can tell you that both the internal box packaging usually fits the computer and associated peripherals including CDs and power adapters. I highly doubt the Walmart store in Jacksonville or Walmart Corporation is substituting used broken computers for new computers. I would think the store employees would steal the computers rather than open the boxes and replace the insides with used computer items. I think someone may have placed an Acer laptop box with the broken used IBM ThinkPad inside the store, but why would anyone do that? Take a look at the sealing tape on the Acer box. Does the sealing tape look tampered? Frank, I would love for you to post your wife's video on youtube so we can all see the actual opening of Acer laptop. Your story MAY be true, it does not make sense.

Unfortunaty your dispute with the credit card company probably won't work. Those boxes are factory sealed and unless you can prove that was returned or some how switched they will probably side with Wal Mart. You also can not blame Wal Mart unless you do have proof that they in fact did switch out the laptop. The Video Tape does not matter, unless you had a video tape of the package from the time she bought it. They could claim that it was switched between the time she bought it and it was wrapped up. I am not saying you did this, this is just what they would claim. Now, if the dispute fails you may be able to try a few other things. Hopefully you still have the receipt and the box and the old IBM All Laptop boxes should have the S/N of the Laptop that is supposed to be inside. This along with your receipt should be proof enough of the purchase of the Acer. If your receipt shows the same Serial Number even better. If you have this proof of purchase you can file a stolen property report with your local police department. After all it was technically stolen. They should then contact Acer and IBM to see if either the laptop's serial numbers have been registered. If they have they can require Acer or IBM to provide the contact information of those people. As that would be a very good chance that they are the ones who performed the "switch". I don't know if this would actually work, but it is something you might want to look into.