The Store: The Sony Outlet In Woodbury, NY
The Product: A Sony HTIB Unit. 6.1 channel, 815 watts, 5 DVD changer and subwoofer and amplifier.
Before I get to the Sony store and this particular product, some comments on the outlets themselves.
There is an Applebees restaurant to sit down, have a beer and some food, and think about which store to stroll through next. Having eaten there twice in the past month I can only ask why? My recent experiences there confirmed for me what I always believed: Applebees is the worst of the worst when it comes to chain restaurants. I have never, ever, had a decent experience there. This food is not even edible. It’s a great mystery to me how this chain has thrived as it’s the worst crap on a plate you can imagine. The sandwich served to my fiancée should be a criminal offense. It looked like a baby threw up in a stale roll.
Well, at least the service is consistently bad. Oh, but the did invent the riblet. A handy little piece of meat that you might believe to be boneless ribs. Aha! They have found a way to cleverly conceal a little shard of bone like a guitar pick in each piece. That’s right, instead of the inconvenience of having to hold onto a bone and eat you can now pop that little sucker right in your mouth and pray you don’t choke to death. Brilliant!
Now for Sony. The outlets claim they sell refurbished goods for discount prices. Refurbished, their sales staff helpfully points out, can mean something as simple as this: the box was badly damaged and the item had to be repackaged, thus inspected again and labeled refurbished. According to the SONY website, it can also mean an item was returned with original packaging as defective and was inspected/repaired and labeled refurbished. Most returns don’t involve defects so it’s a circuitous route to “repackaged.”
So with this definition in mind I purchased a fairly expensive system and gave it to my fiancée for her birthday. To my surprise the unit looked as though it had fallen off a moving truck and was thrown into a box for me. The amplifier was dented, some of the speakers ripped and scratched. Sounds like a little more than repackaging. Unless by “damaged packaging” they meant someone parked a car on the box and ripped it. However, the unti still performed very well and sounded great, it just looked like Hell. It’s not like this was some 50 dollar purchase where I expected some wear and tear either.
So, back I go to the outlets, a 2 hour drive. I explain to the manager that it’s unacceptable to have this happen. That I had to drive 2 hours to replace this “miserable squashed thing” (movie reference there). Well, there’s only one unit like the one I purchased left, and it’s the display model. Upon letting him know how I felt about that idea, he was persuaded to upgrade me to the next unit and make it a brand new one. I should say, to be fair, that he was polite and courteous the entire time and seemed genuinely interested in making me a happy customer.
So I ask, is the DVD player the same in this model? Yes, he says. Same 5 DVD changer. And the amplifier is more powerful! And it’s got another speaker! So I get home and unpack it. Guess what? It’s not the same DVD player. It’s got an extra speaker and yet the center channel speaker is much smaller than the one I returned. My brother tells me smaller is better now with surround sound and some of my own research seems to back that up, so perhaps that is an upgrade. We’ll see when I hear it. However, I loved that other DVD player. Why say it’s the same model when it isn’t? How hard is this?
Look, this isn’t rocket science. You sold me a battered unit that some Iraqi might find cutting edge and sleek but I just found it to be dented and scratched. You should fall all over yourself to make this right. Be a little embarrassed maybe. When I ask if the DVD player is the same, do you think it might be because I liked the other one? Do you think you should check to make sure? I’m going to finish hooking the unit up tonight. If this does not perform appreciably better than the last one, someone at the Sony outlet is going to have a long phone call tomorrow morning. I see no reasonable excuse for this nonsense.
Now, to the outlets. The stores themselves are cool to walk through, some prices were pretty great, others not so much. Take care what you buy, the word “outlet” on the door does not guarantee a great deal.
What’s more, people shopping there from the city and from a seeming slew of other countries, seem to feel as though ramming into people is an expected behavior in polite society. If you see someone waling your direction and they obviously have no room to maneuver, the thing to do is ram right into them. Because they should have, you know, thrown themselves into the shrubbery to get out of your way. However, if you inadvertently back up and nudge someone, they will shoot daggers at you as though you just insulted their mothers.
Take a good long look, while your there, at the women’s shoe stores. Particularly the Nine West outlet. Then tell me men are slobs. It looks like a Hurricane made of shoes stopped spinning in the middle of the store leaving pumps, heels and something called “sling backs” to fall wherever they felt like it. There’s open boxes, ripped boxes, socks, abandoned mismatched shoes and and the like everywhere. These women got so excited about the shoe prices they couldn’t try them on fast enough. You have to literally kick the shoes from your path as you walk. Hopefully you will not bump into someone while falling over the mound of shoes as this would be a grave offense indeed.
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