His Favorite Daughter

DO NOT buy from Tiger Direct unless you have a lot of disposable income and love to be lied to and taken advantage of.

I have to rant here for a few minutes, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

We purchased a bare bones system from Tiger Direct on May 10. It took a couple of days for the system to arrive, but everything didn’t arrive at the same time. The case and the hard drive didn’t arrive for a few days.

We had to wait until our friend, who is a computer guru, was at home to help get the computer put together. A few days after the system was completely put together it started acting up. Since it was less than two weeks since we’d bought the system, we asked our friend to take a look at it. Two of the memory slots on the motherboard were burned out. So our friend called Tiger Direct to see if they would send us a new one.

He was told the particular model motherboard we had purchased was no longer available and they wouldn’t be purchasing any more of them. He was transferred to the sales department to see what options we had.

They told him that since they no longer carried that motherboard, and had no plans to carry it, they would send us a different motherboard as a replacement and told him he could choose from two different motherboards. Both of them would be better than our original, but they would be glad to replace the motherboard for the price we originally paid.

To get the new motherboard as soon as possible, my friend used his own credit card with the assurance from the salesman that it would be reimbursed to HIS card when the old motherboard was received. He was given an RA (return authorization) number and we were told to send it back to them, at their expense.

So, we got the new motherboard, replaced it in the system, and sent the broken one back. The new system, with the new motherboard, works just fine. We were happy . . . until today.

Not only did Tiger Direct NOT reimburse my friend’s credit card like they said they would, they reimbursed us for the price of the OLD motherboard. That is NOT what they said they would do. So, he called Tiger Direct to straighten the mess out.

I’m not entirely sure how long he was on the phone with them, but he was getting nowhere fast. They told him that they couldn’t reimburse his credit card because it wasn’t the card used for the original order. And, they wouldn’t reimburse our card for the new motherboard because it was an upgrade for our defective one.

Our options were to send back the motherboard that they sent to replace the defective one, or to accept another replacement motherboard of the same price range. Miraculously, after I got onto the phone, the manager found out that they had 150!! of the same motherboard in the warehouse. So, not only was my friend lied to about the way they would handle the return, they lied about either HAVING that exact motherboard or they lied about PURCHASING more of that brand of motherboard. In either case, we were lied to.

I told the manager that any store I’d ever dealt with in the past, when faced with similar circumstances, gladly replaced the defective part with an upgrade without our having to pay extra. We were informed that they didn’t do things that way and never have, regardless of what the salesman told us.

Even when I told the manager that neither we or our friend would ever buy anything else from them, they refused to make the situation right. Apparently they don’t care about losing customers, lying to them, or taking advantage of them. I know I won’t purchase anything else from them. My friend won’t recommend them to any of his customers. From this one refusal to do what was right, they have probably lost around $100,000 worth of business of year.

I hope it was worth it to them.

So, here’s my advice. Take it for whatever it’s worth.

Don’t buy anything from Tiger Direct or from CompUSA, which was recently purchased by Tiger Direct. The way we were treated, lied to, and the “quality” of customer service was appalling. I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy the way they handled the whole situation.

Remember, don’t buy from Tiger Direct, they’ll rip you off!