Walmart - 0 Customer - 35.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I like a deal as much as the next person and we (the wifey and I) really needed a new gas grill. We prefer Target for the general miscellaneous shopping but they don’t stock shit for grills. K-mart, diddo. HomeDepot, Sears, Menards, and the like all came up short for what I was looking for - something sturdy, inexpensive, and aesthetically pleasing. And large. Walmart happened to have the best grill for the money. It has two burners inside, one on the outside to the left and a wet sump on the right. The covers over the external grill and the wet sump flip open and are actually small counter top type table thingies. Pretty cool. You may notice that the grill dropped down in price from $225 to $200, on the website. In reality the grill is selling for as little as $150 in certain stores in Milwaukee. This is the crux of the problem.
I had my eye on the price as fall approached, I knew it would drop down as they make room for their winter and Christmas stock. They originally had 9 in stock and the floor model at the $225 price (a good price still, but I knew it would come down). As weeks wore on I watched the price drop to $215 with 3 left. This was just a couple of weeks ago. Do we wait for the price to drop further and risk them being sold out or do we buy now and take our chances? Buy now, was the consensus after having spoken to an official Walmart employee who informed us that we have 15 days to get a price adjustment if the price falls even further yet. Good enough for me and wife. Pick the thing up take it home and then spend the next four fucking hours putting the thing together. They offered free assembly, but I saw how sloppily the display model was put together and I declined the offer. After all, I am a construction worker for chrissakes, should only take an hour or so to assemble right?
Fast forward to 14 days later, next trip to Walmart (probably for diapers or cat litter or something) and I stroll back to the grill display and find that the price has gloriously dropped to $180. Tell the wife, who immediately produces reciept out of purse, and heads on over to the service desk for a credit refund or some such transaction that would give us the difference of $35. Not to be.
Turns out the original official Walmart employee who gave us the ‘15 day’ information was actually Satan in disguise, or not, depending on your view of Walmart. This happens to be my wifes most Biggest, Largest, Megga-est, Turns into Truck Driver Mouth, pet peeve on the planet which is getting screwed and/or lied to.
Apparently we only have seven days to get a price correction and that is apparently generous because they don’t really do this for clearence items, which this grill also apparently was. A lot of things are apparent. Including the fact that I never want to be on the recieving end of the insane ranting person whom I married. But I did enjoy watching the service clerk squirm. Us threatening to never darken their doors again seemed to lend no weight to the discussion.
The proverbial ‘can I talk to your manager’ person that showed up ten minutes later also confirmed this. Even though we were told previoulsy untrue information by a Walmart employee which caused us to purchase said item at the time we did, that mattered not. They wanted a name and description of the employee that steered us wrong and we were unable to recall exactly what the person looked like. I thought he might have been an older black person and the wife was sure he a high-schoolish white dude. Even with our combined descriptions they were unable to produce an employee that would have been working that day that even remotely resembled him, or maybe her. Had we known we were going to get screwed we would have taken better notes.
Anyway, we left the store dejected. A lesson learned I guess. “I did have a cool grill though”, I thought to myself. No matter what happened I would still have the grill, right? Because even at $215 it was a nice grill.
Enter the wifes great idea;
Let’s take back the grill and buy a different one at the reduced price. “But, but, but I just spent half a night putting the damn thing together.” Besides that, I destroyed the box and all the styrofoam that it came in. She finally agreed, that would be more hassle than it’s worth. This was no easy task, the wife hates to get screwed, or one-upped.
Next plan;
Buy new grill at this store and return it to different local Walmart with original reciept. Now you’re thinking!! Easy way out and $35 dollars ahead.
Plan goes off without a hitch, except that I may have slipped a disk draggin that grill from store to store, but that $35 dollars may as well have been the equivolent to World Peace as far as the wife is concerned. We win, they loose. And I mean really loose. As we waited to get the refund at store number two, the three year old let loose the contents of his stomach on the shopping cart and the service desk area in general. Seems that semi-digested hot dogs, chocolate milk, Oreos and Fruit-Loops can make a god-awful looking mess on the floor.

I swear that was not planned.

We just saw the grill for sale (they had two left, one and the display model) at Walmart number two for $150. I looked at the wife and said with as much seriousness as I could muster, “Don’t even think about it”.

2

Good for you. I worked the Wal Mart courtesy desk for several years, and had it been me, I just would have given you the discount anyway, because most people will come to their senses and do something similar to what you did. I learned this lesson from a very horrible (but smart) woman who had bought a DVD. She wanted to return it, but the store policy was that if it was opened, you had to exchange it for the same exact title. Cue me and her going back and forth a few times before she finally very suddenly shuts up, walks to the back of the store and picks up the same title. I do the exchange, and she leaves with nary a word. Walks through the exit, and 30 seconds later, walks through the entrance, fully wrapped DVD in hand, and explains that it’s the wrong movie, could she please pick up the correct movie?

I had to laugh, and did the exchange.

3

I must admit, there have been times I’ve done something similar with DVDs. Amazon’s prices, or really those of just about any online DVD retailer, are almost invariably cheaper than you can find locally. So, if it’s something I’ve just gotta have the first day it’s available, I would order the DVD from Amazon. Then, I would go to the store of my choice, as long as it’s one with a decent return philosophy, and buy the DVD again. I would open and enjoy my store-bought DVD that night.

When the Amazon DVD arrived, I would take it, still fully shrink-wrapped, back to the store with the receipt for the store-bought DVD in hand. I would do the return, and thus I’ve effectively enjoyed my new DVD for a few extra days at the online bargain rate. It costs a little time and you need the available funds to buy the DVD twice, but if you’re really into the movie, sometimes, it’s worth it.

4

So, is the stuff we’re doing technically legal? Morally correct?
I think in my case it was justifiable because the original intent was not to defraud the store. We were given false information and we corrected it no foul no harm.
The DVD scenario is a little gray. One could make a copy of the DVD and then exchange it for a different title, then copy that one, etc.
But in Max Torques case the store is getting back a perfectly sellable DVD and again, no foul no harm.

5

This from the description of the Grill ;

*Fold-out side burner cover (true)
*Fold-out storage cover (true)
*Ironware-coated cast grids (true, very nice and heavy too)
*Stainless steel heat system (yes)
*Box to backyard in minutes (not unless you just cut open the box and dump it on the grass) or (not unless they mis-spelled hours)
*Feeds up to 10 (true, but it would take 10 people quite a while to eat this thing)
*Tank not included (true)
:smiley:

6

I am so impressed you put that grill together in four hours.

My SO and I were barely speaking to each other by the time we put ours together (got half way through and realized the base part was on backwards). The instructions were little more than vague drawings - something you might find etched on a space probe for alien cultures to interpret.

I believe it took us a little over 5 hours, and the orgiginal plan for a happly little cook out was dismissed and pizza was delivered as the sun set on that very long day.

7

D-mark, I had my Jesus box handy. It’s a box with a bunch of miscellaneous nuts and bolts and other assorted parts. This was necassary after the parts ‘container’ that came with the grill fell onto the patio from about six feet up dispersing all hardware to within at least 20 feet of ground zero. I found most of the rubber washers and it seems that most of the hardware that came with it was very small, so I think I’m ahead there. I used mostly 1/4X20 stuff to assemble it, after drilling out some of the holes.
I think it only took four hours because I did it by myself. But in the end we did the same thing you did, order out.
What do you think of it anyway??

8

I figure, if they would allow you to return the unused product for a full, unconditional refund, they should freely offer you price protection. This, since you could just do what you did, buy a new one at the lower price, then return it with the old receipt.

However, I do not approve of Max Torque’s DVD technique. You are basically borrowing stock from the store without compensating them. Yes, the likelihood that they will be hurt is small, but if they ever ran out of stock, you could cost them a sale.

9

Ours was a different model, bought at Sam’s Club four years ago.
Now that it is set up, we have had no problems and it took only maybe 2-3 years before we were able to laugh at the story of putting it together.

Did we learn? No. We recently bought Walmart’s fine quality, butcher block island on wheels for the kitchen. You would think I would have gotten the hint when I read on the box, “some assembly required”. Those three little words were once again the cause of many four letter words.

10

That’s pretty dumb on their part to have a 7-day price guarantee along with a 30-day return policy.
Most places I know have the price guarantee to match the return policy. Both 30-days. Problem solved.
If they need to avoid doing price matches past 7 days they would need to limit returns to 7 days also.
Somebody at Wal-Mart corporate screwed up in a big way, and unfortunately the Wal-Mart employees on the front line have to face the pissed off public.

11

Og bless Mall-Wart. A litter of fluffy kittens is born somewhere every time a savvy consumer outsmarts the Evil from Bentonville. :wink:

Love these stories about assembles in minutes. Yeh, right. Truly, I pity the homeowner who doesn’t have a large hardware selection, a drill index, and a metric/SAE tap & die set before undertaking these projects.

It took about 3 hours for my electrician buddy and me to decipher the instructions for and assemble the stupid grass catcher for his tractor. Much swearing and Molson. :stuck_out_tongue:

12

FWIW I put one of these together for a friend last year. It really did take less than 10 minutes.

13

Show-off!

I think those are like $500 grills though.(?) You probably pay for some pre assembled parts or for very consumer friendly part interaction.
:wink:

14

Cheers to you… last weekend I went to take a 2 month old DVD player that was malfunctioning back and they had the guts to tell me that without a box or reciept they couldn’t prove that they sold the item. I told them if I go back there on the shelf and there is one that would prove it. After 4 managers and lots of BS I finally got them to swap it out. The young electronics clerk said “yeah we cant’ do that” and I told him… by the time I’m done you will… :slight_smile:

15

Now this I have to disagree with. Wal Mart posts their returns policy very clearly, and would certainly require a receipt for a high ticket return. While I don’t question that you bought it at the store, the mere fact that they carry the same DVD player isn’t an indication that they sold it to you - many stores carry the same brand of merchandise.

16

The real problem isn’t out of stock. Its the cost to the company of doing the return. Returns are an expense burden to retail operations – and they will pass the costs back to in in higher prices - or go out of business. Which is why lower cost retailers are usually the ones with stronger return policies.