Crazy News - Strange Stuff - Rants and Raves

I will keep this one short n’ sweet. Sam’s Club just had a great deal last week on the Sony 46″ LCD TV - it was on sale for $998 - But they opened this deal up to non-members?!?!?!?!?! Why did I pay $50 for a membership if they are going to open the best deals to everyone in the entire city? That makes no sense and in fact I think I am going to be asking for a refund on my membership and head over to Costco.

Come on fellow ranters and ravers, join with me and cancel your Sam’s Club memberships because they obviously don’t care about their customers.

Well I can’t give you a review on the entire purchase process because their prices were almost 30% higher than a comparable product from Home Depot. Granted Home Depot had a silly long waiting time of 3 weeks or more for installation and Empire can install the next day, IMO it still does not warrant such a huge premium.

The whole ‘free quote’ process started off poorly after I contacted Empire Today after seeing their TV commercials. I went through almost ten minutes on the phone with a customer service rep and she repeatedly asked me if all decision makers would be present at the time of the quote. The appointment was made and the time came and went without anyone showing up nor a call of any type to delay or cancel. The following week I decided to give them another chance because I was hoping their ‘huge’ international presence would translate into a competitive price.

The guy showed up this time and I sort of felt sorry for him, he had a very defeated attitude and after I mentioned the missed appointment the week before he told us he himself takes a lot of abuse with customers requesting quotes and then not being home when he showed up. One of the most annoying things is the ridiculous practice Empire has where they give you this huge initial quote (ours was $5,000) and then they have to call into head-office to get a discount…..how freak’in dumb do they think people are??? Maybe this company is big down in USA trailer park country where that type of dealing comes across as brilliant. So after a few heated minutes on the phone where are Empire rep tried to bargain down the best price for us it came back at $2,599.00, which was only around $700 more than Home Depot quoted us.

What a joke and a waste of time. The rep apologized and left quickly after I showed him the Home Depot quote and told him to maybe stop by and see it for himself on the way back home. He told us he would find it too depressing to do that.

I guess the moral of this story is that if a company has real neat TV commercials on all the time, chances are you are going to be paying for them.

I think Obama will win by a landslide, 329 or more electoral votes and 62% of the popular vote.  With polls predicting a lead of 7-13 points I think those are under-reported and would not be surprised to see bigger winning numbers than I am guesstimating above.