A product exchange fiasco at Hypercity, Hyderabad

Hi, so its been a long hiatus. Well, am back, for a while at least.

I want to document a particular incident that happened with me yesterday. So on 23-June, I and my wife went to Hypercity, purpotedly India's largest hyperstore in the Inorbit mall and bought ourselves an AKAI DVD player for some 2 grand.

We come home and try it on and the DVD reader doesn't work on any DVD or CD we could find. So, the next day, armed witht he puchase bill, I goto Hydeprcity and try to get a product refund or exchange. I see that a board there proudly proclaims a 14 day exchange policy. Wow, so the product exchange service, meant to de-risk and hence spike consumer trial and purchase, had come to India after all!

So, one floor employee plugs the DVD into one of their TVs and tries soem DVDs out. Same result. Then an entire baraat of line staff arrive to do the same. Its 30 mins plus by now. Clearly, the product is defective. But my queries are bounced along like email forwards within this ever changing group of line employees. Finally, after some 45 mins of endurance testing, someone from 'management' comes in. And then she tells me that store policy prohibits refund or exchange of electronic items.

Well, I'm foxed. Now, why go through this sordid product checking saga for so long, I wonder. And why not check the product before the sale, if this is what policy says?

So I try to reason with the lady - "Look, you sold me a defective product. Why don;'t you contact the vendor for recall? Why am I supposed to go to some service center somewhere when the product never worked even for 1 minute?" and so on.

But the manager is an expert at stonewalling. She continues to wave the policy document around. I tell her, "Fine, I've been a loyal customer, have bought 1000s in goods in the past year alone and that the store gains nothing from pi$$ing me off." She claims to understand. Well, OK.

"See, Wal-Mart, among the cheapest chains i nthe US offers a 60 day return policy. Why don't you keep good on your 14 day one?"
She says: 'But we're not wal-mart'.
"Sure, I can see you're not, but why not aspire to be world-class at least? Does a third-world location serve as a catch all excuse?" I argue. Deaf ears are all the rage by now.

Finally I ask her if she's line staff or managerial staff. She's foxed for a minute and then grandly declares she's a 'manager' here. And I try to explain that unlike line staff, who have no authority to deviate from policy, managers are supposed to exercise judgement. That is why they are given discretionary authority. Since she's clearly unwilling to do so, could she take me to her boss or somebody higher up who has the authority to take a decision?
"No, the boss is not in."
Yeah, right.

And my wife was planning on buying a flat-screen from that store. Imagine getting stuck with a defective product worth several 1000s instead of just a few 1000s? "Whew", I guess. The cloud perhaps did have a silver lining.

Anyway, object lesson here: Pls, pls, pls be careful when buying electronics, mobiles and the like from even fancy name stores, especially from Hypercity, Hyderabad. Always, always better to check the product in store prior to purchase. The fancy big-name stores may not be agreebale to that, if so ditch them.

Anyway, my 2 cents. Jai Ho.