This warranty extension program Costco offers used to be a good deal. I used it twice in the past 10 years with satisfactory results, until today. Now it appears to be just another multi-layered time-wasting consumer abuse program. Here’s what happened after getting started today, confirming what I already knew last night after the TV switched itself off for some reason: I hate Samsung. Not the Koreans. They seemed like really nice people – at least the ones I met…
So the 1yo 75″ Samsung is toast. That’s almost expected these days with the ever-falling materials and manufacturing quality coming out of those eastern sweatshops. Warranty support has gone south now, as well. Had to go through four different phone calls with commensurate waiting periods in between and during, struggling to understand broken English, repeating all the same information each time, responding in things like long, drawn-out phonetically spoken email addresses, for a total of almost an hour invested, only to be informed I would be waiting up to another 48 hours for a call-back. This happens inside the 1-year manufacturer warranty. I paid $100 for that.
No doubt they’ll send somebody out with a new mainboard in a few days. But if that can’t be done with one, maybe two phone calls + a serial number, happening alot more quickly, with alot less intervention on anybody’s part, the shyt’s fucked up. I’m pretty sure everybody that talked with me on the phone this morning is getting paid. They got a little bonus today. JMHO. Going forward, it’ll be worth it to me avoiding the frustration, just periodically give ’em more money and trash the junk every few years, or whenever.
