Apple
Mishandling

Gofatas
11-04-2009
7

Recently, I accessed the Apple Store website to purchase an Apple Mac Pro computer.in the course of this purchase, I intended to utilize a gift card.

I opened the site, configured the computer and entered the gift card information when prompted.

Upon checking out, the site froze and I repeated the process a second time.

Despite following the apparently correct procedure, the system returned a price that did not reflect inclusion of the gift cards. I thought this was peculiar, but had no indication that an error had indeed occurred. For all I knew, the site only indicated total price and my subsequent credit card statement would show the proper amount.

Not being sure, I took delivery, but did not open the box until I could verify against my credit card statement.

When the statement arrived, I saw that the gift cards were not applied to my purchase.

I contacted Apple Online at 1-800-MY-APPLE and asked to speak to a representative. I provided my order number to an individual named Gary who verified that the gift cards were not applied and that they would not honor them post-purchase.in addition, they refused my request to return the computer (and again, the box had not been opened) because it was a custom order (the concept of custom in this case involved simply upgrading to the next large hard drive).

I immediately asked to speak to a supervisor and was passed along to a woman name Glenda at extension 46387. She admitted that Apple had documented cases of the gift card problem on their website and yet, I was treated to the same apologetic, do-nothing dismissal of my issue. Glenda offered to check with her supervisor and call me back within two hours. I told her she could call me back the next day if that helped. That was two days ago. Never called back.

I left two subsequent messages with no response and finally spoke to another unmotivated phone jockey.in short, they agreed finally to take the computer back, but I had to contact FedEx to make the arrangements.

For my inconveniece, I got zero.

Apple likes to portray itself as the good guy versus the IBM clone "bad guys." Yet, they charge more for their product and treat people the same way as any other mass seller of computers. You get nothing more/extra from Apple, but pay a whole lot more.

Real "Microsoft" of them, don't you think?