Report: #27209

Report: Fry's Electronics

Category: Audio & Electronic Retail Stores

Fry's Electronics disguises returned merchandise and sells as new San Jose California

...Common harddrive misconceptions

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Fry's Electronics

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Brokaw Road, San Jose CA
San Jose, California 95131
U.S.A.

Submitted: Sunday, August 18, 2002

Last posting: Tuesday, February 12, 2008

San Jose, CA

I bought a Sony monitor, sealed in the box. Brought it home and started unpacking it. As I pulled out the instruction pamplet, I noticed it was badly stained with coffee. When I called Fry's to complain, they said it was standard practice to inspect, reseal, and put returned items back on the shelf for sale. They even have a shrink wrap machine!! They assured me all the usual warranties would still apply. But I don't give a damn about whether the warranty applies or not, I want new stuff when I pay new stuff prices.

So, like the optimistic idiot I am, the next time I went to buy a Palm pilot for my wife for a present, I grabbed one of the boxes that not only had the shrink wrapping, but had 4 sealed nylon straps around the box. Obviously this was a new unit. I wanted to load all my wife's address info into the Palm so she would be ready when she opened it. Surprise, surprise, Sgt Carter! When I opened the box, the docking cradle, lid, the connection wires, and some of the documents were missing. So I hauled the crap back to Fry's and stood for 45 minutes in the return line. The return guy starts to process the paperwork, glances into the box and throws it in a shopping cart. But, when he asks why I am returning it and I replied that parts were missing, now he gets excited. Even though he didn't notice the missing parts and I could have made up any excuse, now he wasn't going to take it back! He had to go and get a manager! So I'm grilling this dilbert about how I could buy a sealed unit with parts missing, and he fesses up that not only do the have a shrink wrap machine, they have the nylon strapping machine.

NEVER, EVER, EVER buy any hardware from Fry's. Their "inspection" of returned items is a joke. If you don't believe me, go and watch the return item section. You'll see them place stickers on the items and put them in carts for re-stocking. And there are tons of people returning stuff every day. I suppose buying software is ok, because they won't take that back if it is opened. Other than that, you'd be an optimistic idiot to buy anything from this rip off outfit.

Bubba
San Jose, California

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Common harddrive misconceptions David Murray [2/12/2008]

Submitted: Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Posted: Tuesday, February 12, 2008

David Murray

Kennedale
U.S.A.

Common harddrive misconceptions

I'm going to assume when you use the number 1.5 that you are reffering to the capacity in Gigabytes. Which is strange because this was filed in 2002 and by that time, 1.5 GB harddrives were not even available anymore and hadn't been for years. Anyway, the thing is, this is very common and it is more the manufacturer's fault than it is Fry's. One thing that commonly do is advertise the capacity of a harddrive in "unformatted" capacity, which is more than the formatted capacity. They also have a tendancy to round the numbers. For example, a 40 GB harddrive would format out to 38 GB. Sometimes the labelling on the harddrive will be different from the box by a few percent depending on when it was made, when the box was made, etc.

Another possiblity is that your computer's BIOS did not properly detect the drive, which is very common.

Another possibility is the labelling. The vast majority of the time, the model# of the harddrive looks like a figure of capacity, but it isn't. It is just a model number. Sometimes people get confused when they see the model number and think that it is supposed to reflect the size. Sometimes it does, or is close, but often it isn't.

I used to work at a computer store and I would get chewed out about this a lot, so I'm well familiar with the issue. But the truth is, the harddrive typically can store the amount of data that they advertise, but the filesystem takes up some of that space. And we all need a filesystem (such as FAT32 or NTFS) in order to sort all of our files. But the amount of formatted space will vary with different filesystems and operating systems. So it is easiest for the harddrive manufacturers to just show the unformatted capacity.

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