CompUSA empty box story linked everywhere

Cory Bergman June 5th, 2007

UPDATE: CompUSA has sent a $300 gift certificate to Terry. Read more.

A couple days ago, Steve Safran posted Terry Heaton’s horror story of buying an empty box at CompUSA only to learn the company refused to refund him his money. As of this writing, the story is on Digg’s home page and BoingBoing’s home page, among other places, and it’s generating astronomical traffic here on Lost Remote. It’s fascinating to watch how quickly this story is becoming a de facto publicity nightmare for CompUSA among a techie audience — customers they should be most concerned about keeping. (And meanwhile, let’s see if Lost Remote can survive a full-on Digg onslaught.)

UPDATE: CNET.com picks up on the story in “The Queue” (1:12 into the video.)

10 Comments Add your own

  • 1. !  |  June 5th, 2007 at 5:29 am

    hurry!

    mention you have invites to joost and watch the lr server crash!

  • 2. Anonymous  |  June 5th, 2007 at 5:41 am

    Joost. Ya. well. It’ll changed your…well, not so much.

  • 3. Jason  |  June 5th, 2007 at 6:04 am

    If nothing else, some of the comments that people & robots have left on the post have been quite funny.

  • 4. Chris  |  June 5th, 2007 at 6:05 am

    i will point out that steve did not buy form compusa, he bought from a liquidation company that BOUGHT everything in that compusa store. The day they announced they were closing 126 stores all 126 of them were their own entities.

  • 5. Don Day  |  June 5th, 2007 at 7:26 am

    Muh ah ah ah.

    I know how much Diggers hate CompUSA… the story’s a natural for that crowd.

  • 6. Rob  |  June 5th, 2007 at 8:29 am

    Wow. It was at 5 diggs yesterday morning. Last night it was over 50. This morning it’s at 1,579. Technorati has over 11,000 entries about Compusa - follow the URL linked in my name - and a lot of them mention Terry’s experience with them. Talk about a black eye for CompUSA’s customer service department. :D

  • 7. invitedmedia  |  June 5th, 2007 at 8:45 am

    and if they simply pull a camera out of their hat?

    they’ll look pretty dang good.

    seems too easy.

  • 8. Anonymous  |  June 5th, 2007 at 8:46 am

    the item was purchased at a compusa store. regardless of who was selling out of their store, they hava a duty to fullfill the merits of customer service. If not, then i will not subject myself to the risk of falling to a similar trap.

  • 9. Safran  |  June 5th, 2007 at 9:49 am

    What has surprised me most on this is how many people are:

    A. Attacking Terry. (”He should have weighed the box! He should have opened the present before he gave it to someone!”)

    B. Attacking me for writing about it. (”You obviously don’t get it! There are technicalities here! Technicalities!”)

    C. DEFENDING CompUSA (”They didn’t really sell it! Someone who looks exactly like them did!”)

    I have to say - I’ve learned a heck of a lot on this one. I figured this was easy - if there was ever anything everyone could agree upon, it would be “Selling someone an empty box is wrong, is not a ‘Final Sale’ at all, and should be refunded regardless of who was wearing the shirt.”

    That I was wrong? Wow.

    Fortunately, for my faith in mankind, the vast majority of people agree that Terry should get his money back.

  • 10. Vinny  |  June 5th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

    Yeah right. I still get shit about the AOL thing. ;-)

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