Me: Officemax in Stonybrook, can I help you?
Him: Yes, I have a problem. I bought a Lexmark printer from you, and its missing a part.
Me: Which part is it?
Him: The black ink cartridge.
Me: What did the printer cost, about 40 bucks?
Him: Yes, $39.99
Me: Check the contents list
Him: What?
Me: The list on the side of the box that says whats in it
Him: It says it comes with a color cartridge
Me: Then the box is complete, its pretty common for printers in that price range to come with only one cartridge.
Him: But I need a black cartridge!
Me: We sell them.
Him: Oh, how much?
Me: About thirty bucks
Him: BUT THAT COSTS AS MUCH AS THE PRINTER!!
Me: Yes, thats probably why they don't put two ink cartridges in there.
Him: Can I come look through your boxes for one that has a black cartridge?
Me: Sir, none of them do.
Him: Well that stupid, and illegal, and I hate Officemax! Its a bad sales practice.
Me: Sir... you do realize thats the way they arrive from Lexmark?
Him: If I come in and bring the printer, will you give me a black cartridge?
Me: Certainly sir, for the low price of $32.99
*click*
Ladies and gentleman, customers that don't read the box.
He problably will go back to the store and ask for a refund and return the printer and get one from someone else when he calms down. It's not your stores fault though, it's the printer company. Hopefully he'll realise that. Yeah, he should have read the side, but it's not an unfair assumption to make. [ 01-13-2004: Message edited by: diadem ]
Often, when my classmates have unexplainable errors, they come to me for help. I give it an honest try, of course. If I can't fix it, and the computer boots to the OS just fine, I ask them if they know about their "id.10t" file.
Usually, I just get this clueless kinda, "WTF?" look. That's when I explain that id.10t is a core file for their hard drive, and if corrupt or missing, can cause random and serious problems.
At one point, I even had a .exe on disk (programmed in VB5) that pretended to use the id.10t file, and would come up with the error message "ERROR: File 'id.10t' is missing or corrupt. Error Code 0xY0U4R34N1D10T".
It was good for a few laughs, then I lost my disk and the twenty seconds spent programming the .exe.
quote:
So quoth diadem:
Printer companies are the scum of the the earth. Ink is way too overpriced. I don't blame the customer for being upset.
I can't find a link to the article, but I remember reading somewhere that with the price of ink if you tried to fill your cars gas tank with it, it would cost like $150,000 dollars.
When competitor companies started producing generic ink cartridges for inkjet printers, Hewlett Packard took the process a step further. They set up their warranty to be void if you use a generic cartridge. But since some people don't care about the warranty (hey, they only paid 30 bucks for it), HP started building "smart chips" into their printers and ink cartridges, so that a generic cartridge wouldn't be recognized by the printer. The use of smart chips for this purpose was, however, deemed in violation of antitrust laws, so the smart chips were (to the best of my knowledge) not installed in retail models.
And if you think that is bad, you should see the crap the customers at Sears pull.
I love HP. people used to buy the canon's becuse they had the individual colors and were refillable, but they didnt have the same duty cycle as a hp
