UpToEleven.ca

Beware: some whinging follows. If you don’t care to read the whole story, the moral is Don’t buy from Bad Boy’s Furniture.

Sometime near the end of last year we decided to buy a big screen TV. I forget why exactly we chose them. but we ended up buying a 46″ Samsung TV from Bad Boy’s Furniture in Kitchener. The price was entirely reasonable, though we were talked into shelling out an additional $100 (talked down from $200) for a 5-year extended warranty. Having had a previous TV replaced (by Future Shop) under a similar warranty, it seemed like a reasonable investment.

At the beginning of this December, slightly more than a year after we purchased the TV (so that the manufacturer’s warranty had run out), it developed a giant line down the center of it. It still otherwise works but it’s pretty annoying to look at, and so we called up Bad Boy’s customer service to get them to deliver on their “Solid Gold” warranty.

The beginning of our problems was that it took a month of calling and visiting the store before we were able to get “Jonalyn” to set up an appointment for a local repair company to come have a look. The repair guy told me what I’d figured out myself (it would be easiest to just replace the TV rather than repair it), but whatever. It then took another month to finally get an appointment for a replacement TV to be delivered.

Unfortunately, Samsung doesn’t produce our television model anymore, so it needs to be replaced with a different model. Even though ours was a mid-to-high range model when we purchased it, it’s being replaced with the cheapest of Samsung’s current crop of 46″ televisions. I could probably have justified that to myself on the basis that the new TV still has all the features I used on the old one and the downgrade is the equivalent of a years depreciation on the old TV, but here’s the part where they really sell you on their warranty plan:

The 5-year warranty that we purchased doesn’t apply to the replacement TV that we’re getting, since it’s not the same TV, though Jonalyn happily assured me I could go into the store and plunk down an additional $200 to get a warranty on the replacement. Great. I’d phone them back up and argue with them, except that they don’t answer the phones, and I know they won’t return my calls until long after the whole issue is moot.

The extra frustrating part is that we bought the TV on a credit card that extends the manufacturer’s warranty by a year. We likely could have dealt with Visa and been done with this, but figured we should try and get our money’s worth and make Bad Boy deliver on their warranty promise. Two months of frustration later, I’m not sure I’m glad I bothered just out of principle. Since, presumably, Visa’s not going to cover this replacement TV either, if we end up with any more problems we’ll likely just end up having to replace it ourselves.

Since we’ve been dealing with all of this, I checked out Bad Boy’s on the BBB website and found they’ve got an “F“, the lowest grade you can get. I kind of figured that all furniture stores operated at a similar sleaziness level, but competitors like Leon’s and The Brick have ratings of “A” and “A+” (incidentally, is there a reason that the state-of-the-art for furniture store websites seems to have stopped advancing circa 2003?). Future Shop only got a “B”, but that’s still a long way away from “F”.

Argh!