How to get a new TV

I bought a Samsung 42 inch DLP TV back in early 2006. It was fixed once under warranty by a contractor Samsung sent out. Then it screwed up a couple of times after the warranty expired. Nothing too serous, but it would frequently shut itself off and that was annoying. I had also scratched the screen when I was vacuuming and the pole to the vacuum fell over and scraped across the screen. Retirement isn't all drug fueled orgies, you know. The cost of replacing the screen was going to be close to several hundred dollars. Luckily I had purchased the Circuit City extended protection plan.

Circuit City sent out a real nice guy to fix it twice. He was maybe Malaysian or Indonesian. Real polite. He took off his shoes every time he came to my house. He always arrived on time, the very next day after I called, first thing in the morning, 9 AM he was here. I think I may have been his only customer. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about fixing TVs.

It was like a joke-he kept asking me what I thought was wrong with it. The first time he was here he suggested I get a new TV, since my Verizon FiOS service was "too good" for my TV. He made it sound like my year and a half old TV was obsolete. The second time he asked me again what I thought was wrong with it. This time he changed two parts. It didn't fix the problem. I started Googling "Samsung TVs" and "Samsung DLP TVs", I found a whole lot of people having problems with these TVs. Seems the parts are cheap, so people who hav out of warranty TVs just go through their 3 or 4 year old TVs replacing the three or four parts that fail most frequently. I wasn't willing to do this, so I started Googling Samsung Corporation and Samsung top executives. After I found three or four names who seemed high up in Samsung Consumer Electronics Division, I wrote a letter to the president of that division telling him about the problems with my TV. I also found two or three higher ups in Circuit City. In both companies I also included their corporation counsel in the carbon copies of the letter. I told them not only of my problems, but of the many other people I had found on line, literally several bulletin boards worth of problems and advice, with similar problems. I used word in the letter like "defective merchandise" and "class action". I told them I would like a 50% cash credit of the $1500 I had spent on the TV, or a new Samsung 42 inch plasma TV.

About three weeks passed before I got a call from Samsung. A woman named Elsie called me from their headquarters in NJ. She old me that as long as I could send her a copy of the bill of sale, and service records from three attempts to fix the TV, I could have either a reurbished TV of the same model, or an 80% cash refund. Now I was born at night, but not last night. I told her I would take the 80% refund. She arranged to have a trucking company come and pick up the old TV, and at the same time present me with a check from Samsung for $1200. Her only stipulation was that this transaction had to be completed within 30 days.

We got the transaction done, even though the first time the trucking company arived without the check. I had to send them away empty-handed. The $1200 was enough to buy the TV I really wanted back in 2006, a 42 Inch Panasonic plasma. That TV was $2000 then, but had dropped to under $1000 in less than two years. The $1200 covered the TV, the tax, and the extended warranty. This time I bought it from PC Richard, as Circuit City was not much help in dealing with the defective TV.

Hopefully this will help someone else who has purchased defective merchandise. Google the top executives, send your request to them and to corporate counsel, and tell them exactly what you want.