I agree. But as time goes on, only the conglomerates remain by buying out the little guy or making them close their doors. Heck, of the 50 feet of toothpaste on the shelves in the US stores I'll bet 47 feet are made by 2-3 huge companies. Not much real competition.

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During the election they said Obama could only be elected when pigs fly. Well, we currently have an epidemic of Swine Flu. Coincidence?

Indeed. Also, when most of the hard-disk manufacturing companies side up and reduce their products' warranty to one year the competition went down the drain(not to mention cartels are illegal). You could say there still is competition, but not in the benefit of the client, since he will have to pay the same for lesser quality.

That's why my present this Christmas was a WD!(I gave it to myself - I love myself)

Best regards,
Lucian

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Didn't Seagate recently offer 5 year warranties for their Hard Disk Drives? I know they got my attention with that announcement

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Yes, you are right. I hope this will "encourage" the others to follow the trend in order to stay in business.
I'm not sure why I chose WD instead, I guess it's because I've seen it in action - none of my friends have Seagate's. Actually, in our stores they are quite rare, and Maxtor owns a big portion of the market. It's politics, I guess.

Regards,
Lucian

P.S: However, I know that hard disk manufacturers register losses lately, and they started firing people to compensate. Maybe the market isn't what it used to be?

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A friend mentioned he will not deal with Seagate any longer because they took their corporate offices offshore and are therefore no longer "an American company".

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During the election they said Obama could only be elected when pigs fly. Well, we currently have an epidemic of Swine Flu. Coincidence?

My favorite experince was with Antec. I bought a case w/power supply from them. The power supply actually caught fire and melted my floppy drive. I called them up to complain and ask for a new one and they told me they would replace it IF I paid the shipping to send it to them. The pointed out that I wouldn't have to pay for the replacement to be shipped back to me. I argued with the guy for about 20 minutes before I hung up promising to report them to the Better Bussiness burea. The guy called me back 10 minutes later to let me know that he would pay for the new power supply to be shipped out.

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Nice!

It's amazing how the customer service changes when you "threaten" to report them to a gvt. agency.

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That's just the thing... You shouldn't have to threaten any company with, "I will lodge a complaint with the BBB!" If a company, as in your case, dabigmooish, sells you an item that is defective, then they are responsible for that item being defective and should work to replace it or offer you a full refund without any of this 'the consumer must pay for S&H costs' bull. When I worked for a certain office supplies chain, we would exchange defective merchandice without a problem, as long as the product was sold by my chain. That's how businesses should be run in my opinion. You take responsibility for what you sell, and if it's broken, fix it.

That's how it should be, but often isn't nowadays. I've seen far too many companies believe that they are providing such a service to the customer that the customer should be grateful for whatever the company offers. Too often people are willing to just roll over and take it because it's either too much effort to fight the company or it's such a small matter they don't want to bother with it.

A good example is my wife. Right after I lost my job at Gateway, our car was repoed. We never heard anything more about it so we figured it was taken care of by the bank and finance company. This year we got a letter from a collection agency stating we had to pay several thousand dollars for the car because we still owed money on it. This was nearly 10 years after it was repossessed.

My wife just wanted to pay them off to make it go away but I wasn't so willing. I hunted around online and found some info regarding this action. The statute of limitations expired after 5 or 7 years (depending on the state the claim was made), so there was nothing they could do, especially since we had never heard anything about this before. I also found a template for a letter demanding justification of the debt.

I sent it off to the collection agency and to the car company. Within two weeks I received a letter from the car company stating they had no evidence of the original debt, therefore they were forced to close the account and would not be contacting me again.

So, had we done what my wife wanted, Christmas would have really sucked this year; "wasting" several thousand dollars right before the holidays is not a good thing. I took a stand against a wrongful judgement and won.

Yaaaay me!

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I'm sorry to hear that your car was repossessed, but I am glad that you stood for your rights in the end. It just irks me that so many companies will pressure folks and make off with money that they should not have and violate folks' rights simply because so few people really know what their rights are in cases like these.

On the flip side of the coin, I ordered some equipment from Newegg about a year ago now and when I got to the case, every support for the front panel was broken. I got into a chat with a RMA representative, described to him exactly what the condition of the case and its box was, and within 15 minutes had an RMA logged. I was refunded both the cost of the case and the S&H charge for it. I don't know if it was my rep that was trying to do everything he could to resolve the issue, or if that really is the policy that Newegg pushes to its personnel, but I was very pleased with the service.