Computer vendor not honoring warranty. What's the next step?
"You're probably best off going to a different store to fix the computer. Right now you don't have ""damages.""  You could sue him but, there's no thing to sue for.  If you sue for your original costs, you'd have to return the computer and probably only receive a portion of your original costs, less court filing fees. If you have someone else fix your computer you can sue him for the cost to fix your computer.  You'll take him to small claims court, win or lose you probably won't get anything from him.  If you win, you'll have a piece of paper (judgement) that says, ""Yep, that guy owes you money"" if you lose you won't even have that. You could report him to the BBB or some other business agency but that doesn't help you fix the computer." The issue yo have to consider is that under many state laws, you must give a merchant three opportunities to correct an issue before you can sue them, so check with your state before considering that option. Here's a link to the Federal Trade Commission's warranty information page, which may give you some ideas about what your options are. Keep in ind, if you let someone else work on the computer rather than the store you bought it from, you might give the guy a valid claim in court to throw out your lawsuit!  Many times, warranties will spell out the conditions under which repair work can or must be done, so make sure you follow every step to the letter in order to preserve your claim. I would strongly suggest that you start creating a paper trail for your claim.  Start by writing a very precise and detailed letter to the store owner, with copies of all relevant documents (your receipts, warranty papers, etc.) included.  Explain the entire history, including what steps you've taken to date to get him to honor the warranty.  Offer him the option to let you take the computer to another shop for repairs at his expense.  Then, send the letter by certified mail, return receipt requested, to the store owner so that he can't deny receiving your letter.  This is all in order to make the best case you can for your claim just in case you do have to sue him. Do not take the computer to anyone else until or unless he tells you in writing that he is willing to let you do that.  You don't want to risk him arguing that the other shop is responsible for the problems now. I hope this helps. Good luck! "Give him a second chance to fix it.  Some computer problems are hard to nail down.  THIS:  So you're a tech.  It's common to work a problem, do procedure A and B   that should've fixed it, test repeatedly to make sure it's fixed, and   hand it back to the customer... and then the customer, under his   operating conditions, has it fail again.  If it comes back to you, you have the foreknowledge that A and B   didn't work.  And you immediately try C and get it fixed.   This   knowledge does not magically transfer to other shops.   So the user goes into Yelp Mode and storms off angry to another shop... they   blindly try A and B again, burn in, send him home, it fails again,   user's even madder.  This is how computers DON'T get fixed. 5% discount for cash is reasonable. If you want to know why that's normal, sign up for Square.  Credit cards and checks have a significant overhead, including the risk of bounces and chargebacks, and that adds up to about 5%.  Only a few businesses actively solicit it, but many family-owned businesses would accept it if you offered.  So firstoff, does the shop give you a creep factor other than your feelings about him not fixing it the first time?  If so, cut your losses and bolt. You will definitely need to pay cash to have this fixed properly.  Otherwise take it back to him and give him a chance to fix it properly. Having dealt with a lot of customers, what you say sounds an awful lot like ""problem so minor I was able to use it for 9 months before bothering to get it fixed which I'm only doing because the warranty is ending"", and therefore, ""I am resentful about having to give it up for an extended period of time to have it fixed because the problem Just Isn't That Important"".  If that's true, you're in a values conflict and you might just be better off recognizing that.  Cheap PCs are cheap.  But the vast majority of niggling PC problems are not in fact hardware problems, they are just MS-Windows being MS-Windows."
Follow the incentive advice here and offer people a coupon or something if they leave a review.  People WILL give feedback on a good visit if they have a reason to.  As someone who works in software, I can tell you that your information is not completely gone, they just don't want to spend the time to get it back into the production database for you.  Outsourcing to India doesn't help either as those people are worthless. "I've hired a lawyer to make sure all the T's are crossed.   - I am not charging my employer for the service. I created a ""Free tier"" that fits the scale of my employer, and implemented it that way for them. Larger government bodies are paying for the higher tiers. On multiple levels, i've been sure that nothing conflicts with either our purchasing policy, or any written employee policies.    - I did 100% of the work on my own time and using my own resources. I was extremely careful to ensure this was the case. There is no clause anywhere in my employment agreement that says the company owns anything I do outside of company time. Believe it or not, this is actually less of an issue for a government body because the government doesn't exist to make a profit from services, and because they are getting an expensive service for free, it's actually a significant net benefit for them.  I certainly would be at a significantly higher risk if I was working for a for-profit corporation as they certainly would try to go after me.    - I was also careful in how the software was presented. While I agree there is a level of a obfuscation without a doubt, I've confirmed it certainly not a legal issue for the company, nor is it grounds for a lawsuit, and likely not even grounds for termination (although at this point, I don't really care as I have bigger fish to fry)" Yup, 7 figure seller myself. That's why everything possible goes fba anyway. Ain't nobody got time to deal with customers anyway, who can compete on that, especially with Amazon. It's not that the customer is always right, it's just easier most of the time to treat them like they are and move on. If customer issues are a significant part of your business, or can cause that much damage, you shouldn't be in this business. "Can anyone explain why the analyst is writing off goodwill, please?  I would have thought that the HP brand would be worth something for some years to come, that some section of the market will continue saying ""well, it's an HP laptop, it must be decent quality"" and ""you can rely on HP printers"" for the foreseeable future. Or is that something else?" Don't even remind me of poor CS.  My mom was on the phone for 5 hours yesterday 5 HOURS with Expidia because they messed up on their end. They offered my mom $25 credit but they never emailed it.  After the 5 hours they said that they had no record of the calls and we had to call the air plane company ourselves.  I am never using them again What people don't realize is that in many EU countries, you pay a per minute fee (even when on hold) when you call a support line.  Your printer broke and you need to call in for a warranty repair?  That will be 15 cents a minute.  They usually cap the maximum charge but it's often not free to call.  In The Netherlands, it's almost never free.    Also, when you buy something and it breaks under warranty, you generally can't return it to a store and they give you a new one.  Instead they ship it out for repairs.  I bought a new coffee machine in Germany for 80 euros.  It broke 3 days later and when I brought it back, they shipped it out for repairs and I had no coffee machine for a week. "&gt;so I would like to ask you which, at this project, poor management skill of Oracle staffs or plan of Oregon are worse to be accused.  **I believe there is an increased burden on the employer (Oregon) to effectively manage the scope of the work required for the project that the contractor (Oracle) is working on**.  Otherwise, the contractor has plausible deniability for being able to provide deliver a quality working solution.  &gt;Or do you think that plan was made mainly by Oracle?  I think the plan was **mostly made by Oracle with the requirements given by Oregon**, and that's where things seem messy.  My gut tells me though that when an employer hires a contractor for the creation of a fully integrated enterprise system, that the employer essentially signs their financial life away to the project in a way that absolves the contractor of indirect or direct ""damages"" that come from the result of unforeseen implementation requirements or issues.  Oracle has been around long enough to know how to legally cover their asses.  If there is anything that Oregon may have traction on, it would be a few of their fraud claims, given that Oracle has made [two settlements](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_corporation#Justice_Department_lawsuit) with federal agencies of ~$100 &amp; ~$200 million since 2011 which were from allegations of fraud or false claims.  Such claims by Oregon may be supported by the fact that they allegedly have a former Oracle employee who can substantiate the poor quality of the product they were giving to Oregon, but that blame might go back to Oregon's specifications which I have no insight into.  As someone who has witnessed a couple of employer and contractor relationships between public &amp; private entities, my hope out of all of this is that:  * Sales people for contractors think twice before over-promising technology solutions that their company can't fully deliver on given resource constraints or lack of employer specifications.  * Employers ""hiring"" such entities manage them, expectations, plus the overall project effectively while accepting personal accountability &amp; responsibility.  I think the only people who have a clear picture of what was going on were anyone from either party who were on the front lines of managing the project, developing the systems, or running them." It depends on the country. Say I import something cheap-ish from a US reseller with a 90 day reseller warranty and 12 months manufacturer. In both cases it will cost me more than it's worth to ship a return for replacement. A few things, OP.  1.  Begging for expertise is self-limiting.   Oh, and you want sources?  Get bent.  2.  I've worked with Dell, in a vendor-based arrangement for the better part of a decade, on everything from workstation to datacenter projects.   My billing rate is $290/hour.    IM me if you're interested.  3.  Here are the buzzwords to drop for your class.  'Cloud-based infrastructure',  'IT as a commodity',  'Consumer-driven IT',  'Utility Computing', etc.  4.  Read the news lately?   Heard about any technology companies having problems.... maybe... something weather related? No protective order; no NDA; no disco clawback arrangement... sounds like WF just handed over a bargaining chip the size of Kansas. Doesn't mean they can't (eventually) get it back through court processes (as an inadvertent disclosure of a trade secret... maybe), but it's a fuck up more quickly and easily resolved by buying it back. Having people that work directly with the software/hardware or those who actually created it provide support is an amazing thing. It's more expensive than hiring people to read a script, but the quality of support will be very high and if there is an issue with the program it's going to get fixed so they get fewer support calls.  Support should be about fixing the problem as correctly as possible. That may not make sense, but think of it like this. Every day somebody calls in to complain how a program keeps losing it's settings, the person on the other end explains how to export and import the settings so if it happens again they can get back to where they were. They could just keep telling people how to import their settings, or they could develop a fix for it and never have any calls about this issue again. Both fix the issue (in my mind the first one does not really), but the 2nd one is the correct fix, making it work every time and reducing support costs. There are lots of good points here already, but something that hasn't been mentioned yet is what would happen if the purchased items break or are somehow defective? Depending on the warranty and how trustworthy the company is, there could be an advantage to not having fully paid for the item yet when a defect is discovered, as it might incentivize the company to be more attentive to your warranty claim, since they are faced with knowing that you could stop making payments if they don't act in a timely manner. Note I'm not suggesting you stop making payments in this case, just that companies (and banks) are oftentimes more willing to work with you when you owe them money. I vaguely recall a rare helpful employee telling me that, after a ridiculous amount of phone calls.  I thoroughly appreciated that person's helpfulness.    However, I gave my laptop to Best Buy (I had purchased their service agreement), and even if the third party bungled things, it's BB's job to make sure things are ok/to their agreement.  Their employees/management should not be lying sacks of uselessness. "One of the big PC boys (Dell or someone like them) did the whole ""call metrics"" thing, and finally put out the word that if a tech's average call time went over 12 minutes, they could look for new work.   Support costs skyrocketed.   It didn't take much digging to find out why - your average can't go over 12 minutes if no call goes over twelve minutes. So support reps would try to help a customer for 11 minutes, then just send them a new computer." "File a John Doe lawsuit, ""plaintiff to be determined"", and then subpoena the relevant information from Mastercard.  John Doe doesn't countersue, so you're pretty safe doing this.  But it probably won't work.  Mastercard would quash your subpoena.  They will claim that you lack standing to sue anyone because you did not take a loss (which is a fair point).    They are after the people doing the hacking, and the security gaps which make the hacking possible.  And how those gaps arise among businesses just trying to do their best.  It's a hard problem.  And I've done the abuse wars professionally.  OpSec is a big deal.  You simply cannot reveal your methods or even much of your findings, because that will expose too much of your detection method.  The ugly fact is, the bad guys are not that far from winning, and catching them depends on them unwisely using the same known techniques over and over.  When you get a truly novel technique, it costs a fortune in engineering time to unravel what they did and build defenses against it.  If maybe 1% of attacks are this, it is manageable, but if it were 10%, you simply cannot staff an enforcement arm big enough - the trained staff don't exist to hire (unless you steal them from Visa, Amex, etc.)  So as much as you'd like to tell the public, believe me, I'd like to get some credit for what I've done -- they just can't say much or they educate the bad guys, and then have a much tougher problem later.  Sorry!  I know how frustrating it is! The credit card companies hammered out PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards).  This is a basic set of security rules and practices which should make hacking unlikely.  Compliance is achievable (not easy), and if you do it, you're off the hook.  That is one way Amy can be entirely not at fault.  Example deleted for length, but as a small business, you just can't be a PCI security expert.  You rely on the commitments of others to do a good job, like your bank and merchant account salesman.  There are so many ways this can go wrong that just aren't your fault.   As to the notion of saying ""it affected Amy's customers but it was Doofus the contractor's fault"", that doesn't work, the Internet lynch mob won't hear the details and will kill Amy's business. Then she's suing Mastercard for false light, a type of defamtion there the facts are true but are framed falsely.   And defamation has much more serious consequences in Europe.  Anyway, even a business not at fault has to pay for a PCI-DSS audit.  A business at fault has lots more problems, at the very least paying $50-90 per customer to replace their cards.  The simple fact is 80% of businesses in this situation go bankrupt at this point.   Usually fraudsters make automated attacks using scripts they got from others.  Only a few dozen attacks (on sites) succeed, and then they use other scripts to intercept payment data, which is all they want. They are cookie cutter scripts, and aren't customized for each site, and can't go after whatever personal data is particular to that site. So in most cases all they get is payment data. It's also likely that primary data, like a cloud drive, photo collection or medical records, are kept in completely separate systems with separate security, unlikely to hack both at once even if the hacker is willing to put lots and lots of engineering effort into it.  Most hackers are script kiddies, able to run scripts others provided but unable to hack on their own.   So it's likely that ""none was leaked"" is the reason they didn't give notification of private information leakage.  Lastly, they can't get what you didn't upload.  Site hacking is a well known phenomenon.  A person who is concerned with privacy is cautious to not put things online that are too risky.  It's also possible that this is blind guesswork on the part of Visa/MC, and they haven't positively identified any particular merchant, but are replacing your cards out of an abundance of caution."