Best Buy "Open Box" deals...Caveat Emptor!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have a customer that dropped off an Aluminum iMac (glass panel, Core 2 Duo processor, the current shipping line) that he got as an “Open Box” item at a dirt cheap price ($650ish) with the “full factory warranty” back in late November

the machine would randomly power down and lock up, completely unstable behavior, so I grabbed my copy of Apple Service Diagnostic (a low-level hardware test suite available only to Apple authorized techs) and ran it for a 24 hour loop test…

on the first loop alone, it flagged the following failures;
GPU fan unable to reach a steady-state speed
CPU thermal sensor outside safe range (overtemp)
Hard Drive S.M.A.R.T. tests failed, no S.M.A.R.T. hardware detected

So, I remove the glass panel, front bezel, and LCD display to find…

The Power/SATA/Inverter cable (“Multicable”)exiting the power supply wrapped up in what seems like a cocoon of electrical tape, easily a quarter of a roll, the cable jammed into the cable keepers, and a second long piece of electrical tape holding the cable in position over the power supply
a brownish/gray haze on the metal frame of the machine, classic symptom of a shorted power supply
all four screws holding the power supply in half-screwed-in
two of the chassis grounding screws just resting in their holes, perhaps turned in one thread only
all three sensor cable friction connectors partially seated

it looks like someone did a hatchet job of a “repair”, it wasn’t even a repair attempt

I pull up the machine’s serial number on the Apple database, the machine was originally purchased in January of last year, the customer’s “factory warranty” has ONE month remaining, and the logic board was replaced almost six months ago

According to Apple, the machine was “repaired” by Best Buy

It’s obvious to me what happened, this was a used and repaired machine that BB sold as a “Open Box” (customer return or store demo, not repaired), clearly a mislabled, misrepresented product

It was also one of the worst, most incompetent “repair” attempts I have ever seen, as soon as i lifted the display out of the machine and saw the hackjob done to the Multicable, my immediate response was WTF?!?! WHO worked on this thing?!

I notified the customer and he was NOT happy in the least, he’s going to take the machine back to BB and have a long…discussion…with them about it

If you’re buying Open Box consumer electronics from any of the big-box stores, beware… you never know what might have been done to the machine previously, if the price is too good to be true, it probably IS

this customer should have realized something was wrong with this unit when the selling price was 50% less than a new machine…

2

Good lord. That’s some fine “repair” work there. I don’t think I’ve encountered anything that bad in my time as a tech. There was the one wannabe rig-builder who brought his machine in because it wouldn’t POST, and as soon as I opened it I knew exactly why: He fastened the motherboard to the case. Directly to the case. No risers. It was one big short circuit.

But at least that didn’t leave any permanent damage. (When it left anyway. No doubt Mr. DIY would eventually try some other stupid stunt.)

But this is why I avoid open-box stuff from the retailers. Having worked at Future Shop (before, during, and after the Best Buyout) I knew the kinds of things people tried to get away with at the customer service desk. (I didn’t work in that department but I saw plenty of the things in the carts labeled for return to the depot.) Most CSRs have no idea what to look for to see if it’s even something that qualifies for a return, so they just nod and punch buttons and refund money or offer store credit. The stuff that they take back ends up either coming back for “open box” deals or being sold to remerchants. The return rate on open boxes at least 50% – missing or broken parts, partial or no functionality, etc. The usual reasons.

I’ve been known to buy up bulk remerchant deals on eBay for $15-20 that usually have a ton of these sort of returns in them, because there’s often some good stuff in there that’s still good so it’s worth the investment. Plus I can usually test and resell the stuff I don’t want from it and make my money back. :smiley:

3

We bought a pair of JBL stereo speakers from the out-of-the-box shelves at Best Buy. They were supposedly the store’s demo speakers, never sold, never left the store. They retailed for, IIRC, something like $250 (I looked them up online when we got home), and they were marked down to $32.50. We had a $25 gift card from a friend, so we plunked down a whopping $7.50 of our own money for this set of speakers.

Too good to be true? You’d think so, but they’ve been kicking ass and taking names for the past 4 years!

Sorry to hear about your client, though.

4

Yeah, “Open Boxes” are a crap shoot, but sometimes the stupidity of the Best Buy techs and their general laziness works in your advantage. I don’t generally think that the people who do the work there are interested in screwing the customer explicitly, they are just careless and clueless. Sometimes that leads to a steaming pile of shit that a customer buys and he gets screwed on, and sometimes it leads to a perfectly good item, like new, getting sold for a big discount just because the cellotape was cut.

Honestly, from the dozens of Best Buy employees I know personally they all would gladly screw their employer since they wouldn’t see any benefit from it either way and they have a bit of a grudge against “the man”.

5

The computer I’m using is from Best Buy. It was, as far as I can remember, a “demonstration model”. They knocked a hundred or so off the price, I took a chance, and two years later I’m still very happy with it.

I bought a router from them shortly thereafter. It was brand new, sealed in box, and just didn’t work. Several phone calls to escalating levels of the manufacturer’s tech support later we decided I had to return it to Best Buy and get another one from them.

Okay, fair enough, we’ll try that. I took back all of the stuff I had. I did not, however, have the original box. After some back and forth about how I needed to have the original box in order to return the item, the guy I was dealing with went and got a router. He opened the box, took out the router, handed it to me, and put the one I had brought back into the box.

There was now a nonfunctional router in a box for the Best Buy inventory system. There was now a functional router in my hands, which is also still working quite nicely. Another crapshoot, as I’d have had a hell of a time returning the second one, but it was more than he had to do for me.

If there’s a moral here other than “stuff happens”, or “be nice to the people who are in a position where they are supposed to tell you to piss off but can, if they want to, make your life nicer” it would be “caveat emptor”. Consider it another data point.

6

My usual beef with BB (and Futureshop) is that they only mark down returned stuff by 5% (not worth it when it’s non-returnable). They then don’t bother to reduce the price more later, so you end up being able to have one someone returned for some reason for x$, or get one with a rebate this week for x-10$. :smack:

7

I’m back at work, and it turns out I mis-remembered the problems, they were;

Hard drive fan unable to stabilize
GPU heatsink error, unable to read sensor
SMART tests failed, no SMART hardware found

since BB replaced the logic board, and did such an incompetent job of it, I’ll bet that the GPU heatsink error is because the “tech” forgot to plug in the sensor cable to the logic board, the vidcard on the Aluminum iMacs is a replaceable part, and has a thermal sensor that must be connected to the logic board…

I’d also hazard a guess that the “tech” that butcher…err…“worked” on this machine originally may have damaged the Multicable somehow, maybe nicked the insulation and grounded the multicable on the frame (hence the brownish smoke stain on the frame), and since the “tech” didn’t want to take the 30-45 minutes needed to gut the machine to the frame in order to replace the damaged Multicable, they simply cocooned the multicable in electrical tape

the facts are;
the Multicable has been mummified in electrical tape
there appears to be a faint smoke path on the frame, but there is no sign of damage to the power supply itself
the power supply screws were not tightened down all the way
the sensor cable friction connectors were half-seated
the grounding screws were not tightened down at all
the logic board was replaced by Best Buy

I’ve purchased Open Box stuff myself, at BB, Circuit City, Tweeter, and it’s all generally been good, I’m not bashing Open Box goods, just saying that one needs to have a healthy dose of cynicism when dealing with steeply-discounted OB items to avoid getting burned

if it seems too good to be true, it probably is

8

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Every once in a while a news organization will test out computer repair facilities by giving them a computer with a simple problem and seeing what they determine is the issue.

Best Buy comes up with the worst answer (i.e., most expensive and irrelevant to the actual problem) every single time.

I wouldn’t trust Best Buy with any computer.

9

I’ve bought a bunch of equipment from the used-and-overstocks auction house at Best Buy, and about a third of what I get is no good. So far, I’ve been lucky in that the things that didn’t work were headsets and speaker systems, rather than computers and monitors.