Broken $2200 Sony VAIO TZ? Best Buy Will Replace With $600 Asus Eee PC!

Wow. So a Best Buy salesman convinces you to get accidental damage coverage for your laptop when you buy it a year ago. So when you accidentally drop your laptop, you’d expect Best Buy to eagerly replace it, right? With something comparable, right? Apparently not. Oh the store played nice when setting up the replacement, but it seemed the good intentions of a floor guy were overruled by the by-the-book intractability of the higher-ups.

The attendant showed me a what she referred to as a comparable model (Vaio Z) and said I could take that as a replacement or use that money($2000) towards another computer , in essence store credit. I picked out a computer that was more expensive and she said it was fine, but I had to pay the difference. When we got to the register and as she started to ring me up, she stated that she had not done this type of return before and she asked a colleague to help her. She was told it was being done incorrectly and we were sent to talk to the supervisor of the computer department. This is where the trouble began.

I was told because of the specs of my computer the most comparable model was $600, which was an Asus EEE pc, but they would do me a favor and give me $1200 for a 15” Dell. When I stated to them that neither of them were comparable, because the sized and features that the TZ, they replied that they do it spec for spec and that my laptop only had 1gig of ram, a 1ghz processor and 100gig hard drive, and that was the closest computer. When I tried to explain to them that this computer was expensive because of the size features and ultra-portability; they ignored me and threatened to make my in-store credit less than $400 for some other netbook.

Wow. Good thing I’ve never bought from Best Buy! Got any bad experiences with the retailer you’d like to share? I’m simply too busy going wow. (consumerist.com)

(image from eeepc.asus.com)