Mordtech’s Blog

Fry’s Electronics store poor customer service

I purchased an Asus Motherboard from Fry’s in Fishers Indiana. The system was going to be an ESXi PC for home use. When I got the machine home, I wasn’t able to find where to enable AMD-V. I found an article online that made it sound like you need to upgrade the BIOS to get the functionality to enable the AMD-V. I downloaded the rom file from the Asus website and extracted it to a USB key. I booted the workstation into the BIOS and ran the EZ flash utility. Everything appeared to have gone well, until the system rebooted. I received a bad checksum error and that it needed the backup rom to restore. I popped in CD that came with the board, and it reported an error stating that it was too old for the functionality of the system. The processor was a Quad Core Phenom 2.4ghz with 4GB of Crucial Viper DDR2 1066 ram. Next I tried downloading an earlier version of the BIOS rom and changing the name to what the system was looking for. I tried different version of the ROM, USB, CD, and could never get it to fix the BIOS.

So, I packed the family into the car and made the 40 minute drive back to Fry’s. I packed up the motherboard, processor, fan, memory. I took everything in, just in case I switched over to Intel. Well, after speaking to the customer service rep, she was going to give me the credit for the motherboard and I was going to go grab a Gigabyte. Another rep, looked at the box and said that I was missing the shield for the case to cover around the ports on the back of the case. Unless I picked up the exact same board, I couldn’t return the board without doing an 80 minute round trip. She spoke to her manager who said there was nothing they could do.

Now, I knew better than head up there without the shield. I even looked at it before I sat down in front of my workstation to research other boards that would work with ESXi that they had at Fry’s. Now, if they would have said that there would be a restocking fee or something along those lines, for 10-15%, I would have paid it. When they told me there was nothing they could do, I told them fine, I’ll return everything else. I returned $300 worth of components, all opened of course, and I’ll return the motherboard on Monday. If they drop the price for open boxes by even 10%, that little shield will end up costing them over $30.

I always try to purchase locally before going online, if the costs are even remotely comparable. It helps to keep the local stores open and I assume that I’ll get better service than from an online vendor. However, the local store needs to realize that they usually charge a premium over the online retailer, and as such, they need to be aware of customer service. Now, I’m fully aware that the mistake was mine, but Fry’s could have handled the situation better. Hopefully, someone from the Fishers’ Fry’s will pick up on this post and make their service reps aware of alternate solutions to situations.

December 21, 2008 Posted by mordtech | Economy | Fry's | Leave a Comment