TigerDirect.com warranty woes

It's Personal Comments (2)

(Update: If you’re going to read this, you should also know that TigerDirect, or at least someone who works for the company, apologized to me in May ’08. Better late than never.)

This is in the nature of a consumer rant. It will be one-sided, and I expect that everyone who reads it will be in complete agreement with me, even if that includes Carl Fiorentino, founder of TigerDirect. In fact, I hope Carl will read it. It might save me from having to call his house in Miami on Christmas Eve, as at least one other disgruntled customer has done. There are only a half-dozen or so Carl Fiorentinos listed in the Miami. I can make time to do that, if necessary.

Here are the facts. Rest assured that I can come back later and make this as comically vituperative as I feel, to the point where it will be the kind of thing that people copy and paste into email and send to all their friends. I don’t really want to do that. I also don’t want to make a video where I take a sledgehammer to the product in question, or record a hilarious sound file with savage commentary and my testy back-and-forths with TigerDirect’s Department of Customer Aggravation.

Nope. Just the facts, for now.

• I bought a video card from TigerDirect.com in June. It was an Nvidia 8500GT and I paid $89.95 for it.

• In October, the DVI port on the card failed. It was pretty easy for me to determine, since I use a two-monitor setup and one of them didn’t have any video on it any more. The monitor was fine; and the DVI port didn’t work when I put the card in another computer, either.

• So I went and checked my warranty. TigerDirect indicated that the card was warrantied by Nvidia, parts and labor, for a year. “Fine.” I try to contact Nvidia, which is more difficult than you might think. There’s no obvious email address on their site, and when I called the phone number that TigerDirect listed for them, I got a “voice mailbox is full” message, several days running. But I finally managed to get with them through the support forum on their site.

• Nvidia tells me, after several days of going back and forth, that they don’t have any warranties with end users. They license their technology to manufacturers, who make video cards and sell them with warranties. It was definitely *not* something they’d do, warranty a video card, and they tried to figure out what company might have made mine. They couldn’t though. They said that TigerDirect was wrong about Nvidia providing a warranty, and that they hoped that TigerDirect would take such statements off their web pages.

• This was all happening in November. Since then, I have been engaged in fruitless exchanges of email with TigerDirect. These were long emails; sometimes I had to start over again from scratch since, despite having a complaint reference number, it seems that TigerDirect customer help has a similar problem to the girl in the movie Fifty First Dates — they can’t remember anything about what happened the day before.
• The last email I got from them, from “Luis,” came last week. He said that my complaint/reference number was “no longer valid.” I started to get … testy.

• They haven’t written since, or responded to two emails. In the second, I mentioned the Better Business Bureau and the possibility of calling Carl.

My main point in this matter is that TigerDirect, in its sales material, stated that the product was warrantied for a year, parts and labor, through Nvidia. This turned out to be a false statement. I really don’t care if TigerDirect and Nvidia had a misunderstanding. That is not my problem. It is TigerDirect’s problem.

Initially, I simply wanted to RMA the card and have it replaced. TigerDirect was still selling the card with the same Nvidia warranty on the product page just a couple of weeks ago. As of today, that same link brings me to what is probably the same card — only *now* they list a manufacturer, KFA2. The card now sells for $49.99 after a $30 rebate. The warranty is through KFA2. Is mine? I don’t know, and I don’t think that should be my problem any more, either.

I should mention that, obviously, I have long since replaced the video card; the defective one is sitting at my left elbow. I don’t know why I leave it there, really.

So — I’m wondering what I “deserve” here. Because I definitely did NOT deserve the runaround I’ve gotten. I think, initially, I deserved a reasonably hassle-free exchange of my card. But now, I’m thinking, TigerDirect ought to give me a credit of $89.95 and an apology.

Minimum.

Happy Christmas, Carl. Where, exactly, does the buck stop at TigerDirect? Someday we’ll look back at this and laugh. And maybe I’ll regale you with the tale of my experience with a Black & Decker coffeemaker and a Mr. Palffey, in 2003. I didn’t have a blog, then …

(Continued …)

jss @ December 20, 2007