HP’s brilliant offer…
Let me ask you a question:
If someone offers you something… anything… say, a new car, and the sticker price is $25,000… but you know a guy who owns a dealership and you can get the car for $10,000, what’s the value TO YOU of the car?
$10,000, right?
OF course.
So check this out:
HP Tech support says that if I go and buy a new router to replace the Linksys WRT54G, they’ll give me 2 sets of ink cartridges to make up for my trouble and expense.
They say that the value of their offer is over $200.
Except for this fact:
I’ve never paid more than $8 for an ink cartridge, sometimes less. So the value of their offer, to me, is about $60, which is LESS than the cost of a replacement router!
And when I point this out to them, they say they’re doing me a FAVOR!
A favor? Correct me if I’m mistaken, but:
- The only reason they even NEED to offer me this favor is that they sell a printer with a KNOWN incompatibility, don’t list this issue on their website, don’t have any of their Level 1 support staff informed about it, and haven’t fixed the problem in over a year! and;
- This doesn’t account for the set of ink cartridges I burned through going through the L7780’s setup, time and time again. And;
- This does not even come CLOSE to making up for the DAYS AND DAYS of crap they’ve put me through — from needlessly moving my printer from room to room, as if “different electricity” would fix the problem, to making me un- and re-install their bloated software, which takes 1-2 hours each time (I’ve been asked to do it 3 times in the last week alone)
It amazes me when a company doesn’t grasp how inexpensive it can be to make an unhappy customer happy… and how expensive it can be to not make that small expenditure.
I think it’s time to get my lawyers involved.