Did you know that MicroCenter lets you return anything for 30 days? That includes software! Opened!
Now, I certainly do not condone theft or piracy. (No smiley here… I’m serious.) But, their policy has won me as a customer for life.
I recently lost my Palm :eek:. I went in to MicroCenter because I happened to be nearby and noticed that they had a replacement, in stock, for the same price everyone else was offering. I was surprised because I assumed CompUSA and online stores would have a better price. Then I saw the sign about their return policy. I had to flag down an associate (just as tough as it is at any computer store) to get the straight dope on their policy: They will let you return anything except a laptop computer withing 30 days of purchase, for a complete refund.
It seems that university students were abusing the policy around finals time by “borrowing” laptops. I said, “You mean you will sell me 10 CD-ROM games, a CD Burner and blank disks, then accept it all back 5 days later, open, no questions asked?”
“Yes, no problem,” came the proud reply.
It seems that the suppliers MicroCenter buys from have no probem accepting open software on a return. The associate said that other stores don’t do it simply becasue they don’t want the hassle!
Is this true? If so, should all stores adopt this policy?
Hi. Former employee of Egghead Software, here. We had the exact same type of return policy- 30 days, no matter what, so long as you had all of the pieces.
Well, sort of. Generally, retail chains have a “buy-back” program with vendors, where products can be returned for partial or full credit towards future purchases. So the opened copy of Microstuff Sword 2000 that you give back to the retailer is sent back to Microstuff, and Microstuff gives the retailer credit towards the next Microstuff purchase made by the retailer.
The advantage is pretty obvious- You can offer satisfaction assurances to customers: don’t like the product? Not what you need? Bring it back in! We aim to please!
This disadvantages are not as obvious, but they do exist. Oh, sure, there are the people who will buy stuff, copy it, then return it; but that’s not a particularly large crowd, and good salesmanship (and judicious refusals to uphold the policy) can deal with that.
What’s really a problem is the cost. The retailer generally doesn’t get full credit for the returned items, so there’s money lost there. Then include the time spent by its employees to ring these products back through the register, catalog them at the end of the day, and ensure that the returned products are ready to be returned. Now add in shipping costs, as you have trucks driving from store to store to pick up the returned merchandise. Add in more time for people at the warehouses to sort products by vendor, and more shipping costs to send the products back. And remember- all of this is on a product upon which you’ve made no money on.
Basically, it’s an expensive program. And you have to negotiate allowable return rates with the companies you buy software from, which means that you might negotiate an initial higher price for the software in order to keep from going broke on returns.
Having price-shopped MicroCenter plenty of times as an Egghead employee, you may find that they’re competitive on some items, but they jack up prices on other items to try and make up for their costs. Of course, my experience was six years ago; MicroCenter may have changed its priorities and procedures drastically since then.
Oh, and one other disadvantage- do you know how many people assume that, because you take back any returns, the software you sell is already defective? “Y’know, they just take your defective stuff back, re-wrap it, and re-shelve it. Eventually someone buys it and keeps it past 30 days, and that’s how they get rid of it.” So it’s not necessarily all the great publicity that it could be.
[Edited by John Corrado on 10-12-2000 at 09:39 AM]
Frys Stores accepts used returns but takes a real long time to get anyone in the store to do it. Then they just put it out for sale. Ive heard from a lot of people who said they buy stuff there & find software for another product in the box. It seems Frys never returns anything to the manufacturers.
I used to work at Microcenter about a year ago. What the one by me does is they resell the returned stuff at a discount, from 10-50% usually. Its clearly marked as returned merchendaise, and has a no return, no warranty policy. Its sometimes worth it, depending on what it is. I bought an Intel Create and Share camera pack for half price, which was a great deal.
I bought McAfee VirusScan Deluxe once and it was just one big crash-o-rama. Most of the “scan” features wouldn’t turn off (you’re supposed to be able to turn each feature off or on). There was a patch, but the software wouldn’t let you download the patch, and the patch wouldn’t download for you if you didn’t have the software installed (the patch would have taken about 15 minutes to download, but the computer would lock up after about 5 minutes online if the software was installed). I couldn’t get any response from McAffee. And it cost $70. Best Buy took it back for store credit, thankfully. ~ I won’t buy software from anywhere that doesn’t allow returns for full credit; I’m not paying my money to become a beta tester. - MC
