Sunday, August 13, 2006

A quick warning against purchasing electronics based on a political agenda:

A while back, the DVD player in my bedroom gave up the ghost. It was a night when my liberal (and dirty, not because she's liberal, just because she's dirty) friend Robin was in town, and after we went to see a movie I wanted to go by Wal-Mart to pick up a new one. For some dirty hippie reason she's opposed to shopping at Wal-Mart and insisted we go to Target instead, so being the nice guy that I am I went along and bought the cheapest one they had, which was a Tru Tech model. I assumed Tru Tech is the Target store brand and I didn't really have any reservations about it since I've had several Emerson, Sanyo, and Durabrand (the Wal-Mart store brands) electronics throughout the years, and while they may not have all the bells and whistles of the Sonys and RCAs of the world, they're cheap and they work dependably. What I forgot was my vow to never buy cheap electronics from Target again after the great "I need a portable CD player for the warehouse at work, and Target has them on sale for $14.99!" fiasco of '04. I actually bought two of them so we'd have one in the kitchen at the apartment, too. So I brought one in and unboxed it only to discover that the laser wasn't attached to anything. No problem, I got two, right? Wrong. I ran out to the car to get the other one, and IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A LASER IN IT. So I returned both of those and just got my money back and went a little further down 280 to the Wal-Marts and both of the ones I bought that night are still working today. So fast forward to the DVD player. When I got it home and plugged up, the remote control wouldn't work. I figured it was just the battery wasn't good, so the next morning I got up and ran to Walgreen's to get a new one. The battery wasn't the problem. So I boxed everything back up, returned to Target and, still not remembering the "Are you kidding me? There isn't even a laser in this one!" fiasco of '04, swapped it for another one. I got it home, plugged it up, and everything seemed to work fine for like a week. Since then I've had nothing but problems with it. It takes forever for it to recognize a DVD, sometimes I have to eject and re-insert the disk several times before it will, sometimes I even have to unplug it to get it to eject the damn thing...to put it simply, it's just a total piece. So next time you decide to purchase electronics from Target, go to Wal-Mart instead. They may not treat their workers like your hippie friends think they should, but at least their products work.













$27.96, and you can probably send it with your kids to college in 20 years...

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