Tag Archives: buy buy buy - Page 4

A New Piece, And A Little Less Peace

Posted by on February 17, 2020 No comments

After lunch today, I had the idea to visit the Cash America pawn shop.  I don’t bother much with pawn shops anymore, and it’s rare that I visit them, much less buy anything.  I have the assumption that most everything there is overpriced or has some problem with it.  Although, I do admit, I bought two Wii systems from pawn shops and those have been just fine.  That’s probably my last purchase, a couple of years ago.

So today, I browse around and ended up spying and buying a graphic equalizer for my stereo setup.  It’s made by Technics and is the correct vintage for my CD player.  The model is Technics SH-8017.  The EQ was $25, but was marked down to $20 early for President’s day.  And when I checked out, they made it $20 after tax, so even a little extra. 

IMG_20200216_141209

But when I went to check out and pulled out my credit card, they asked for my ID.  I said, "That’s new," and the manager said it was, because, you know.  Yeah, pawn shop.  And then, I was completely set up in their system with an account.  Name, address, phone number, date of birth, the whole works.  To buy something!  midway through, I though this wasn’t worth it for $20 and almost pulled out cash, but also considered, this was going to happen sooner or later and the sooner I can get in the system, I won’t have to do it again.

But what a weird thing, to have to create a customer profile to buy something.  Then again, is it weird?  You do it all the time when shopping online.  It is weird when buying something over a counter.  But is it?  You usually give up all that stuff when you sign up for loyalty or reward programs, too.  And it is a pawn shop, after all.  Everything behind those doors is a strange legal limbo.

But anyway, with all that behind me, I took the device home and plugged it in.  Everything worked quite well.  I noticed no additional noise when running it inline with the Technics CD player.  The only thing wrong with it is it’s missing one rubber foot (not seen in the front right), which I’ll be able to buy replacements for easily enough.  I tested out its capabilities using my CD of ZZ Top – Afterburner, which is notoriously anemic; even more so through the Technics CD Player.  As shown, I simply boosted the lower two bands and that raised the bass level to something more appropriate.

Could I have done the same with the tone controls on my preamp?  Well, yeah, but two things: first, there’s no quick bypass for the tone controls, so I would have to adjust them every time.  With the EQ, I just turn the device off to bypass it.  Second, the bass control is probably centered around a higher frequency than the lowest two bands on the graphic EQ.  That usually causes some "boominess" and is why tone controls aren’t that good for sound shaping.

I recently read a quip from a blogger whose opinion I trust and he said while using studio monitors for music listening (as I do) is fine, they tend to make the music more clinical, whereas normal amps and speakers are designed to reproduce music with a bit more excitement or punch.  So now, I have to consider if I want to go that route and if so, what amp and speakers to get.  My setup has been pretty good to me so far.  I guess it’s time to go to the next level.

Not For A Lack Of Trying

Posted by on February 11, 2020 No comments

Fresh off my success of building two CD shelving units, I set my sights on what else I could do.  I have plenty of resources available to me in both time and money, so I have a desire to use both of them up.  It’s a well-established habit of mine to try lots of different things and generally abandon them shortly afterwards.  In most cases, the abandonment leaves behind some investments in the hobby.

Looking back, I have some photography equipment sitting idle.  I could certainly pick that back up at any time again.  I have a decent GPS unit from my geocaching times.  I have a vinyl cutter and heat press from the derby days.  I actually have a vinyl sticker designed for one of my cars that I want to cut, but haven’t taken that step yet.  I have a sewing machine that’s been still in the box for months planned to help me hem my curtains and maybe for some other craft projects someday.  I have plenty of power tools, which actually were used in building my shelves.  Do I have all the tools yet?  Of course not.  So when I get a fresh idea, I have to buy the tools to execute that idea.

Before the shelving unit project, I did the most basic of woodworking projects: a rack for my sunglasses.  And when I say basic, I mean it.  Literally, cutting six pieces of wood, sanding the edges and screwing them together to look like:

As time has gone on, I have grown my sunglass collection and outgrown my storage.  Now I need a bigger rack.  Fresh off my success at building shelves, I figure I can build a nicer storage unit.  I did some research and found a design that I like and I should be able to replicate.

To have someone make this for me is $132.  It’s about $10 in wood, if even that.  The construction is interesting, using joints of some kind (dado? box? rabbet?  Hell if I know).  I have plenty of tools, but the ones I have are way too robust for working with wood this thin.  First, using a circular saw on 1/4" plywood would probably just shred it.  A jig saw would probably work, but in both cases, I have to consider that I’m losing a bit of wood each time I do a cut.  When your target size is only a couple of inches and you’re sawing away 1/8", that’s a fair bit of waste.  Additionally, the holes for the joints are pretty precise.  Too much for the jig saw.  I researched using the Dremel for this, and it probably would work, but it’s not the ideal tool for the job.

The answer to these problems is another tool, the scroll saw.  I am actually not a stranger to the scroll saw.  It’s probably the first power tool I ever used, way back when I was probably about 10 years old.  Maybe I used a power drill first, but the timeline is really close.  I have no idea how the Craftsman scroll saw came to the house or if it was even meant for me.  I can’t imagine my dad bought it for himself.  Regardless, my parents had just had the kitchen flooring redone so there was a lot of scrap wood around that I was able to saw up into nothing of any interest, since I had no goals or plans.  But I did learn how to use the saw, so I will be able to apply that old, old knowledge for this project.  Humorously enough, at the time, I never knew what the saw was called, so when I eventually broke all the blades, I couldn’t get any replacements because I couldn’t explain the device to the hardware store people.  All they offered me were jigsaw blades.  And with no blades, that ended my time with the scroll saw.

Scroll saws don’t have to be expensive, but they can be.  I bought the cheapest one I could find for $115 since I was not someone who would require a $500 tool to make a $10 sunglasses case.  The other tools I would need are a drill and I think I’ll be using files to square off the holes and make the openings precise.  I have both of these needs covered. 

While I’m waiting for the saw to be delivered, I planned out my design.  The design I’m copping needed the sizes boosted a little bit to accommodate the cases my glasses would be stored in.  Even so, I can still get all the pieces out of one 24"x24" sheet of wood, with a second sheet for the back.  Total size: 14" x 14.75".

So, to recap.  This is a $132 handmade item.  I’m spending $115 on a new tool and maybe $10 in wood.  I’m going to spend less money, test and expand my crafting skills, plus acquire a tool that I can use at any point in the future (like my camera, GPS, vinyl cutter, or sewing machine).  That’s what a hobby should be about – acquiring skill and junk.

What I’ve Heard Thus Far

Posted by on January 23, 2020 No comments

I had mentioned in a previous post that I had a thing for buying cheap CD players, the reason for such was to compare the sound of each and see if I was able to hear any real difference between makes and models.

Well, this is what I’ve got in my collection right now:

IMG_20200111_211611

From top to bottom:

  1. Technics SL-P330
  2. Scott D980
  3. JVC XL-V311
  4. Onkyo DX-701

Of these four players, the ones that get the most play are the Technics and the JVC.  The JVC has a little bit better bass and the Technics, in the opposite way, has a brighter sound.  The other two, the Scott and the Onkyo, have a similar sound, which I feel is a little dulled.  The Scott has an additional handicap in that the display can display either the current track or the track time, but not both simultaneously.  All but the Onkyo have support for indexed tracks, and the JVC will show the current playing track and index.  I have yet to find one of my CDs that has indexes, though.  Still looking…

All four have headphone jacks; the Technics and the Onkyo have headphone volume controls, which is great.  All but the Onkyo can be run by remote control, and I purchased remotes for the Technics and JVC.  In both cases, the remotes were twice as much as I paid for the player.

And on the subject of cost, each player cost me less than $10, and each player was originally $150-$300 when new, so this is not an expensive endeavor.

Spending Money On A Silly Idea

Posted by on January 12, 2020 No comments

One of the more dangerous things in this world is a man with extra time and extra money.  A danger to himself and to the world at large.  If it’s not an actual, you know, danger, then it’s just stupidity – a different kind of danger.  Semantics aside, I have some extra time and some extra money and wanted to get an answer on something.  With the entire knowledge and experience of the Internet failing me, or at least failing to convince me, I set out to get my own answer.  Am I going to change the world with my soon-to-be-found knowledge?  Fuck, no.  It’s so trivial, it hardly even matters to anyone.

To even appreciate what I am seeking, you have to be pretty involved in my hobby of CD collecting.  If you’re not, then the rest of this post won’t even really interest you.  Further, you have to be fairly experienced with technology and computers, otherwise, this won’t really make much sense.  So, warnings provided, now for the explanation.

In the early days of CD manufacturing, some CDs were pressed with "pre-emphasis", which is a special equalization.  CD players as part of their manufacturing specification had to be able to detect pre-emphasis and apply a reverse equalization (de-emphasis) when playing back these early CDs.  Sounds pretty simple, right?  Over time (actually very quickly), pre-emphasis use was discontinued, so all CDs today don’t have pre-emphasis anymore.  That’s fine for the general public, but somewhat of a nuisance for early CD collectors like myself.

Now that you understand the situation, here is the problem in a nutshell: CD players – and especially computer CD-ROMs – do not have the capability to detect pre-emphasis anymore.  So if you play back an early CD, you do not get the corrective equalization applied to the music, which makes it sound thin and harsh.  This also applies to CDs that you rip on your computer.  There are software plug-ins that can apply de-emphasis to the files after they have been ripped, so the problem can be somewhat mitigated.  But aside from using your ears, because the CD-ROM cannot detect the pre-emphasis, you can’t know for sure if the CD you ripping has pre-emphasis.  Again, not a problem for anyone but early CD collectors.

And so what I am looking to know is:  I want to be able to detect pre-emphasis on CDs in my computer.  Thus, my project.

I’ve discussed the CD history, now for the computer history.  Early computer CD-ROM were literally mini-cd-players.  They had a headphone jack and a volume control and some even had a play button in addition to the eject button.  Additionally, on the back of the drive, there was a jack to run the audio from the CD drive to the computer’s sound card.  These old drives played audio CDs in analog.  They had build in DACs (digital-to-analog converters), but you can be pretty certain they were not of the quality found in home stereo CD players.  Still, because they were doing the digital conversion, they also had to support handling pre-emphasis.

As technology moved on, pre-emphasis was no longer a concern and also, Windows began reading the audio from CDs digitally.  So drive makers dropped the headphone jack, dropped the DACs and dropped analog output completely.  It made the devices cheaper and audio could be read at the drive’s full speed instead of the 1X speed of analog.  Technologically, a great step forward.  But in the process of simplifying the device, they removed the capability to read pre-emphasis at all – it wasn’t needed.

But now, I want to get an old CD-ROM that has a DAC and analog output so I can hopefully detect pre-emphasis when ripping a CD.  The problem is that all those old drives use the IDE interface, which is long, long obsolete.  Computers now use the SATA interface.  But that’s only a stumbling block because of course someone has made an IDE-SATA interface converter.  So, technically, everything is still possible.  I don’t have to go to the extreme of building an old Pentium computer from parts salvaged from the 90s, thank god.

Naturally, EBay is the order of the day.  Because this project is only for curiosity, I’m buying stuff as cheap as possible.  For $16, I have a 19-yr old CD-ROM and an interface kit coming by next week.  Then it will be a challenge to see if I can get my computer to see the new (old) drive, then it will be a challenge to see if the ripping software will talk to the new (old) drive, and if it does, will the drive report the pre-emphasis information to the software.

So, there’s still some unknowns.  For the $16 I’ve spent, I’ve purchased a lottery ticket for either frustration or a jackpot of, "oh, neat."  What will I do with this incredible information?  Well, obviously, I’ll share it whenever I can.  It will be a good data point for my posts on Relative Waves and I’m sure some other collectors would like to know which CDs have pre-emphasis.

Road Trip In ATL

Posted by on January 8, 2020 No comments

Over the weekend, I made a road trip up north to Atlanta to see some friends and explore some shops for CDs.  Before I left, I did some research on places I wanted to visit.  As is my default, I used Bing.  A lot of people dismiss Bing as useless, but it’s probably for the same reason that I dismiss Google – I just don’t use it.

Bing Maps has a neat feature where you can save places into an itinerary, and it will create driving directions automatically from the list.  This is what I came up with for Saturday’s run.

image

The downside to using Bing Maps is that it’s not part of Android Auto, which is how I do the navigation in my car.  In the interest of being fair about the routing capabilities of Google vs. Bing, I took a look at Google maps to see if I could have done the same thing there.  What I found was that you can make a custom list of places, but you can’t automagically turn that into a multi-waypoint drive.  I suppose you could keep the list open and work your way through the items, choosing each in turn as the next destination.  So, it’s just a different way of accomplishing the same goal.  I’m not going to say "Google sucks, Bing rules" because that’s just stupid and we should all be more adult about this.

On one of the stops at CD Warehouse – a chain store that has been bankrupt for almost two decades; I have no idea how these ones are open – I found a CD to purchase.  It was a Japan pressing of an Eagles compilation.  I identified it as purchase-worthy because of the smooth case that had "Patent Pending" embossed on it.  These are some of the first CDs manufactured, when the jewel case was still a new invention.

I took the CD to the counter, paid and left the store.  After leaving, I snuck a peek at the CD and realized it was a common US pressing.  I was disappointed but unsurprised.  CDs can certainly migrate between cases, especially in a store that probably has a dozen of each title at any time.  I chalked it up as a buyer-beware failure on my part and moved on.  Later in the evening, I was looking at my whole day’s spoils and realized that the Eagles album was not in a smooth case.  I had been given a totally different CD instead of what I chose from the rack.

So I began debating if it was worth the effort to go back and demand the item I had chosen.  Would it still be there?  Would the staff just roll their eyes and say, "fuck off"?  Would I get the replacement and have it be no better than what I already had?  Was it worth the drive anyway?

I decided it would be worth the effort, and planned to go before driving back home on Monday.  My friends convinced me it would be better to try on Sunday because of workday traffic and were willing to sacrifice some of our day together to accomplish this.  So, with the store’s closing time quickly approaching, we set out for the store with the replacement.  We made it in the last 15 minutes.

I went to the rack and quickly found the same smooth case I had originally picked – they had simply put it back after I left.  I went to the counter and plead my case.  I had been rehearsing how to explain that I wanted this specific CD and not just any CD and had planned to try and be technical without being condescending.  At the most extreme, I would have to show them my Relative Waves website that explained the difference in CD masterings.  In reality, I was pretty awkward about the whole explanation, saying that I got a different CD, but it was the same, but it wasn’t the same.  Good job, Dave.  Way to explain it.

The guy at the counter said, no problem.  He went to the computer and scanned the old CD and my purchased CD, then retrieved the actual disc that was supposed to be in the case.  As he placed the CD in the case on the counter, he said, "there you go, Japanese pressing."  And at that point, I knew that he understood.  I didn’t need to say anything more than thank you.  And I left with my early pressing album.

Also on the list were some antique malls.  In my area, people seem to treat antique malls as consignment shops and as such, you can find people selling their personal CD collections (which technically could be antiques).  However, in this area, antique malls are filled with actual antiques.  Not of any benefit for CD hunting, but still a fun and interesting experience.  I did find some tiny décor items for the house, so it wasn’t all bad.

And finally, the thrift stores.  This is actually my second round of thrifting in Atlanta.  The first time was a long series of disappointments and this one was generally a shorter version of the first.  It just makes me more grateful that the thrifts in my area have some decent selection of CDs.  Maybe there are more collectors in Atlanta keeping the thrifts bare, who knows.

But the trip was not supposed to be about me and my hobbies anyway.  It was about the company and the experience.  In that respect, it was top-notch.  There’s plenty to be grateful for in spite of any success or lack of success in my hobbies.

Interrupted

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

Over the last week I ‘d been dealing with seemingly random shutdowns of my computer.  They would happen at odd times: 2:00 AM, 1:00 PM.  Always when I was never there, never when I was working on it.  I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what would cause it.

The computer was recently disjoined from a domain, maybe a scheduled task blue screening the computer?  No, nothing in the event log about a Stop Error.  Nothing in the event log about anything, really.  Some USB device causing trouble (I suspected MagicJack)?  No.  Unplugging the USB devices made no difference.  Overheating? No.  Fans all work.  Bad RAM?  Well, maybe.  I mitigated the problem somewhat by changing the BIOS setting to power the computer back on if it was shut down unexpectedly.

My answer came on Saturday morning when I heard the computer reboot on its own at 4:30 in the morning.  I wasn’t going to jump out of bed and check on it, but it definitely became top priority for the day.  Later that morning, while I was on the computer, the power to the house blinked.  This happens often and the investment in UPS systems for all the computer equipment has paid back many times over.  All the UPS’s in the house raised their alerts, and my computer still shut off.

image

And then – because it had been caught in the act – the UPS started blinking its “Replace Battery” light.  Well, thank you…

So a quick trip to a battery shop, which I was expecting would end with “oh, we don’t have that in stock, we can order it, but since it’s Saturday we’ll have it in on Wednesday”, left me pretty impressed.  I went in and asked if they stocked UPS batteries.  They said they did, so I brought in the battery pack from my UPS and a dead, bulging battery from a cold spare UPS (not so much a useful spare, right?).  The salesman recognized the batteries right away, quoted me the price off the top of his head, and had them in stock.  Kudos to Battery USA for knowing their stuff.

Ten minutes and $50 later, I was out the door with brand new batteries and prospects of a smooth-running computer.  Haven’t had a glitch since.  $50 in batteries beats out buying a new $250 UPS by… about $200 or so.

Upgrade Your Misery Today!

Posted by on December 31, 2019 No comments

Here’s the banner for an email I recently got:

image2

Quicken and WillMaker.  Two products that go so well together.  One makes you want to die and the other helps you be prepared for that moment.  It all works together: Customer Service (I want to kill myself), “put your life on hold”, 2012, Quicken.

You couldn’t ask for a more cohesive piece of marketing.

And this is pretty good as well.  The point of the email is “Improved Customer Service is Now FREE2”, with the footnote “Valid for 2012 Quicken customers only and available for a limited time; subject to change without notice.”  So, what I gather from this is: Quicken used to charge for good customer service, but now they are doing what they should always have been doing. They won’t do it forever, though.  They won’t tell you when they’re going to go back to the same old crappy customer service (it’ll just kinda start happening), and you still have to pay for it by buying the 2012 version.  In other words, business has dropped off and no one is calling our support lines because they either have left us or have learned to deal with the existing bugs in Quicken.  That means our support staff can help you better until enough people buy the 2012 version and swamp us with new bug reports.

And they are still pretty much the only game in town.

A Christmas Burden

Posted by on December 28, 2019 No comments

As a collector of CDs, sometimes I fantasize about coming across an old collection that’s up for sale, one with lots of old and rare CDs in it, along with CDs that I would also want to listen to.  I’ve read about people having experiences like that – they’re not common at all.  But Sunday, I was fortunate enough to have one of my own.

I had planned to visit my local flea market that day to check out and maybe buying a dart set for fun.  I have a board set up in my garage, but I don’t seem to have any darts anymore.  So I visited the booth with the darts and because there was only one set available, I decided to hold off another week until he got his order with different models.  My flea market doesn’t have a resident “CD guy”, so I don’t stop in very often.  But I did feel like getting some walking in, so I wandered the halls.

I found a couple of temporary sellers with CDs, but their selection was terrible and in poor condition.  Another seller had like 10 CDs out.  Sigh.  But, leaving that seller’s stand, I saw a booth across the hall with a couple of larger CD racks.  I went over to see what was there.  Within 10 seconds of browsing the rack, I could tell this was a personal collection.  There were items there that I never see anywhere else.  In one rack, there was almost the entirety of the IRS NoSpeak series, something I had completed this year.  I could have saved quite a bit of money, here.

Alas, I didn’t find anything in the two front racks, but when I stood back up and actually looked in the booth, there were six more racks and a couple of boxes of CDs.  Oh my god, if it’s all the quality of what’s out front, I’m in trouble.

And without dragging it out, yes, it was and, yes, I was.  There were two criteria I was working with at this booth.  The first was looking for stuff I wanted (duh).  The second was looking for any smooth-sided cases, which would indicate early CD pressings.  In the first criteria, I found maybe 6 CDs.  However, when it came to smooth cases, this collector was seriously an early adopter.  I was pulling out CDs 2-3 at a time and stacking them up into multiple piles.

The total at the end was 62 CDs.  The lady charged me a whopping $55 and even was willing to take a credit card when I explained I didn’t have enough cash to cover the purchase.  I was willing to do PayPal or some other method to avoid her getting a fee, but ok.  She was very happy to move so many of the CDs at once, and I was very pleased with what I had pulled out.

Back at home, I stacked the CDs all up and began cleaning the cases.

img_20191215_151223

After cleaning them, which took a little over half an hour, I had to step away to let my mind think about what I had to do.  I broke the incoming items into three piles: things that were duplicates of what I already had (and might be upgrades), things I definitely wanted to add to the collection, and the rest was going to have to be evaluated to see if I wanted to keep it.  I ended up with 20 definite adds, 6 or so dupes, and the rest was left for later.  Then I had to take another break.

What we’re talking about here is listening to 50+ albums.  Even being really aggressive about it, listening to one CD on the way to work, one on the way back, and maybe one at night, we’re still talking almost a month of new music.  And listening to an album once isn’t always fair when choosing to keep it or not, and I do want to be fair.  That means a whole lot of music has been dropped into my life.

And that quantity of music is overwhelming.  Believe it or not, I haven’t listened to any of it yet.  You would think I would have immediately popped in a CD coming back from the flea market, but I was too shocked at my fortune.  When you have over 60 albums to listen to, where do you start?  The genres are all over the place, so I could get anything, really.  What a first world problem.

I pulled out the 20 albums that were on the must have list and got them logged into my Discogs account.  It put my collection’s Max total over $20k.  Obviously that’s highly optimistic, but it’s still a milestone.  I compared the dupes in my collection to the newcomers and only swapped one out.  The other 5 have to get compared and posted on my other blog.  So I have plenty of things to do ahead of me next week.

You Get What You Pay For

Posted by on December 28, 2019 No comments

In posts leading up to this one, I’ve been talking about my garage and new cars.  Well, I finally got the new car and got in it the garage, only barely.

img_20191023_185442 img_20191023_185500

And I mean barely.  And with that car in the garage, there is no room for the other car.  I’m supposed to have a 2-car garage, and even so, I would classify the MX5 as a half-car, but still, there’s not enough room.  So that’s that.

Now, all about this new car.  As you see, it is a station wagon.  There’s only a handful of wagon models you can buy new in the US right now, and this particular one, a Buick Regal TourX, gets zero marketing and has zero recognition.  I saw this car once on display in a mall back in 2018, and have never seen one since.  So suffice to say, this is a rare vehicle.

The TourX is rare because it’s really low production volume.  There’s aren’t many buyers for wagons, so dealerships don’t order many and so no one ever buys them and the cycle feeds on itself.  When I decided on a car to buy – a wagon – I looked at my available options and this one was the most economical.  Well, it was economical for reasons relating to its unpopularity.  Dealers wanted to sell these things and not so they could order more; they just wanted rid of them.  In my own research, I saw that the 2020 model is coming soon and there are still 2018 models being sold new.

I haven’t purchased a car in nine years.  This time around, I utilized a car buyer service – a person who would search for my car, negotiate a good price, manage all the paperwork with the dealer and basically make the process as easy as possible for me.  When I first got started, I laid out all my criteria and within an hour, he had found me a car.  When he ran the numbers, I was pretty underwhelmed.

The TourX can run up to $40k with all available options, and that is what this particular car had.  So, $40k MSRP and with all discounts and haggling, I could get it for $35k.  After all the taxes and fees were added in, I would pay $38k.  I don’t know… I understand taxes and stuff, but a final price only $2k less than MSRP didn’t do it for me.  And it was about $6k more than I was willing to finance anyway.  So I turned it down.

The buyer went back to work and found another car with fewer options (but all the ones I wanted).  The MSRP was $38k, sale price of $31k, final price of $34k.  That was doable, so I agreed to the offer and we went through the complete sale process, which wasn’t all that bad.  The car was transferred from one dealership to another where I would actually make the purchase.  I gave it a brief test drive and no red flags were raised, mechanically.  The car did have roof racks, which I didn’t want, but I determined I could just uninstall them.  And after two hours at the dealership, I went home with a new car.

It’s been a couple days now, and some of the reality is hitting me.  The first weird thing I experienced was a warning popping up on my dash: washer fluid low.  Ok, whatever,  I can buy a $3 jug of fluid and top it off.  I would have assumed the dealer would have checked all that stuff during the “dealer prep” or whatever that BS service is.

When I popped the hood to fill the washer fluid, I was left aghast.  There were leaves all jammed up under the cowl.  Not just a few leaves, literal handfuls of leaves.  And the plastic shrouds throughout the engine bay were not just dusty, but had a layer of dirt on them.  This hood had not been raised in many, many months.  Yes, the exterior of the car had been washed and the tires glossed up, but there was no detailing of this car in any sense of the word.

As I was pouring the washer fluid in, my astonishment grew.  It just kept taking it.  I poured the entire gallon.  All of the washer fluid in the reservoir had evaporated in the time this car was sitting on the lot.  And the mass of leaves reaffirmed just how long the car was sitting idle and suggested it was not even stored on the primary lot, but in a grass lot back by a tree line.  I found out where the original dealer was located and did some quick math on the mileage for transportation and my test drive. I then determined this car had never been driven once.  It left that original dealer on its way to me with probably about 10 miles on the odometer.

This poor car.  It came to the dealer and was completely neglected for its entire life.  Yeah, yeah, of course cars don’t have feelings, but everything deserves a small level of care.  And a dealer should care for each and every vehicle in their possession.  These are going to be in someone’s family soon (or not soon in cases like this), and they deserve to be treated well until that time comes.

Now, I feel a little conflicted.  I mean, I got a great deal on a car – $7k off sticker price – and I didn’t have to deal with salespeople or haggling.  It was a very low-effort transaction and I can recognize it was probably a low-profit transaction for the dealer.  But at the same time, I still would expect one of the two dealers involved would have opened the hood and at least noticed the mess, or checked the fluid levels.  The bottom line is that I feel like I purchased a car from auction and not from a dealership.  Was I expecting to build a relationship with that dealer?  No way; they are 40 minutes away from my house.  I have dealerships closer to my home and my workplace I would utilize first.  Did I still expect to be wowed by the “new car purchase experience”, where I can show the car off to everyone?  Sure.  I mean, doesn’t everyone pop the hood and show off how clean and new everything is (instead of dirt, leaves, and a post-it note that says “do not turn off”)?  Show off every feature of the car like the power liftgate (which would reveal dusty and dirty rubber seals)?

But, I got a good deal, right?  Now I just need to spend some personal capital on a detailed cleaning of every inch of the vehicle.  Then the TourX will be mine and it won’t need to dwell on its miserable early life alone in a back lot.

One More Reason To Hate People

Posted by on December 25, 2019 No comments

This is a problem I’ve been reading about with increased frequency.  A person will buy some thing, then fill the box with something else and return it, getting a refund and keeping the original thing.  In the cases I’ve been reading about, it’s hard drives.  A person will buy an external hard drive, open the case, switch out the large hard drive with a small hard drive (working or even not working) and return it to the store.

What happens is the store looks inside the box (maybe), sees everything is there and puts it back on the shelf for someone else to buy it and discover they got a tiny hard drive instead of what they thought they were getting.  That customer brings it back to the store and the cycle repeats.

This is very lucrative for some people, for people that lack morals, anyway.  But this happened to me on a less lucrative item, although no less infuriating.  I purchased an outdoor LED security light.  It wasn’t super cheap, in the $30 range.  I got it home and when I opened the box, inside was your typical two-light incandescent light mount, probably under $15.

Now, I am faced with a bunch of bullshit.  First is the wasted time and travel to return and replace this item.  Second is the thought that the store doesn’t really know that I wasn’t the one that made the switch and am trying to pull the scam off myself.  Third is the thought that the store may not actually take any action on this and put it back on the floor to repeat the cycle.  Clearly, something must be done here.

It’s easy to put the blame on the store, and I’m mostly in agreement.  I can understand the customer service part of no-hassle returns and wanting to make the customer happy, but they still need to verify the item being returned is the same as what was purchased.  And I think anything returned should be flagged with a label indicating it is not "new stock".

And while this sounds great, reality says there’s actually very little stopping thieves from doing whatever they want to do.  How about the stories of people using self checkout to buy expensive things and ringing them up as bananas?  How about the rule that "loss prevention" is actually not allowed to engage with a suspected shoplifter?  Just keep on walking, they can’t stop you.  They literally can’t stop you.  And when shitty people learn this stuff, they just do it.

I had the thought that night that if I had used self-checkout, the mismatched product would probably have been caught because it would have a different weight.  The register would have said something like incorrect item in bagging area.  That’s great, but you know what really would have happened?  The clerk would have just overridden the register and I’d be on my way with the wrong item anyway.  Again, it comes back to the store, but they’re just doing whatever it takes to make the customer happy, because self-checkout problems are a sure-fire way to piss people off.  If you’re making the customer do the work, you had better make it easy for them.

But let’s just make it clear, customer service is a poor term when the customer is not even a customer, but only a thief.