I bought a brand new dvd of “The Day After Tomorrow” on sale for $9.99 yesterday at Circuit City. For the first time ever in (my) history of buying dvd’s, the clerk asked if I wanted to buy antiscratch insurance. For $4.59 I could bring back the dvd within 90 days (or so, I wasn’t listening all that closely) if it had any scratches on it that affected its performance. I naturally declined this cockamamey offer, as I do all such point-of-sale warranty pitches.
Well after spending a lot of effort in opening the unusually tightly taped security packaging, I settle in to watch it. About 2/3rd into the flick, it started skipping periodically-not so as to lose any parts of it, just momentary hesitations. I suffered thru it, even though the plot got really ridiculous.
When the sun came out (sorry about no spoiler), I looked at the playing surface.
Sure enough, there was a 1/2 inch long scratch diagonally across part of the surface. I had not caused it. This is only the second new dvd I’ve I’ve ever bought that had a defect. (The first was one from Time-Life Music that had a 1-mm circular air bubble hole halfway out its playing surface. They exchanged it.)
GQs: Has anyone else ever been offered or heard of antiscratch insurance on a new dvd?
Would a mass marketer knowingly sell scratched dvds and offer antiscratch insurance to cover their assets?
If I try to exchange it are they likely to invoke the “You declined our 50% premium rate on the insurance. Forget it!” or similar retort?
I’ve never heard of anti-scratch insurance, so I can’t help you on that. I do hope that if you were to get any answer other then “I’m sorry you had problems. Here, let me replace that for you” that you would kick and scream your way up the hierarchy at Circuit City until you got a better answer.
I don’t know about anti-scratch insurance, but I would say good luck trying to get a replacement. I remember a guy I used to work with last year telling me that he had bought a new DVD at Best Buy (“The Time Machine”, I think) and could only get it to work on one piece of equipment at home (out of 2 DVD players, an Xbox, and his computer). When he took back to the store to try to exchange it, the first thing they did was pop it into one of the DVD players at the store, and it played just fine, so they refused to even exchange it for another copy of the same title.
what’s next, CC offering Volcano insurance, because as we all know, my brother, who is a real expert on these things, says that a volcano is coming this way!
IIRC, CC’s dvd return policy is you can exchange it for the same title, you can’t get your money back if it’s been opened, so swapping for an unscratched one shouldn’t be an issue
that’s why i always open the DVD’s in the car, to check for scratches, if it’s scratched (I will not buy this record, it is scratched…) i take it back and swap for a replacement
FYI, it’s not hard to remove scratches from CDs and DVDs. I just did it for the first time this weekend with a little Brasso brass polish.
I found that one of my favorite CDs had a couple of huge scratches (I have no idea how they got there), and using Brasso and a cotton cloth I gently polished the surface until the scratches were gone. It took several applications to get the worst of the scratches out, but it was a cinch.
I don’t recall how much I paid for the can of Brasso, but it probably wasn’t much more than $4.59 (if that) and that’s enough liquid to polish hundreds of disks.
BTW, there are other ways to do this, too. Some people use really fine grade (i.e. 2500-3000) sand paper, toothpaste(!), or auto polishing compounds. A little googling will get you lots of methods.
Possibly yes, but have you ever filed a complaint with the government over a $10 item? Of course, I guess you could hire the “hot coffee at McDonalds” lawyer and file a million dollar lawsuit.
Disney offers replacement DVD’s for $6.95 if they should ever break or become otherwise unusable. All you have to do is register your DVD, and you’re covered.