King of the Performance Guarantees

This week had been a very long one and I was in an extraordinarily bad mood on Thursday evening. I sat down on the couch to just relax with some XBox 360, and chuckled to myself “To top it off I bet I get the red ring of death.” Now the red ring of death is a condition that happens when Microsoft’s XBox 360 has a hardware failure. Mine had always run perfectly. So I go to fire it up, and yup, the red ring of death appears.

I don’t know if I willed it, if I was just psychic, or if it was the biggest coincidence ever. All I know is that I was pissed, and my XBox 360 was broken. I actually couldn’t help but laugh at the ironic twist the week had given me.

So I go fishing for my paperwork and find that when my wife and girls nefariously obtained it for me, they bought the two year extended warranty. It was under the wire, I still had two months left. So, I went to Best Buy with the old Xbox and my receipt, and they let me swap it out right there. In fact, since the price had fallen, they gave me a gift card back for the difference! So for the extra $49 at the time, I now have a brand new XBox 360 Pro and got back $53.63.

There are people who say these guarantees are rip offs, but I tell you, we’ve used them all the time, and Best Buy has been pretty great at honoring them. A couple weeks ago a compressor went out on our refrigerator. We had the $99 in house extended warranty. They ordered the part and will be fixing it shortly. Also, since we had food spoil, they cover $200 food spoilage. So for the $99 we paid back then, we’re getting the refrigerator fixed, in home, and getting $200 back when we send in a receipt for new food.

We also paid for the guarantee on our Roomba carpet cleaning robot. He started just going in circles the other day… guess we’re going to get our money’s worth 🙂