Seared by Sears

This one's gonna be long, so hold on to your bell bottoms...

Yesterday, as you now know, I buyed an allegedly digital TV set. I quickly discovered though that the picture didn't work.

I wasn't planning on doing anything about it today, but at 1 PM, my mom called and insisted I get it taken care of, because I'm not going to be able to borrow her car again for another week. She informed me of something rather interesting about that particular set, the Sylvania CR202BL8, which I'll get into. But she said I had to exchange the TV immediately. Now. At once.

Now, I had a lot of pain in my youth (which I'm not getting into) that still makes my moods bubble to the surface 20 years later. After hearing of how I done got took, the old heartache momentarily gurgled back.

The TV I got yesterday was from the Sears in Florence, Kentucky. When my mom showed up at my place to pick up the Sylvania to be returned, she showed me a website she printed out off the Internet about the scam Sears is pulling. I knew Sears was one of several retail giants that was fined by the FCC for not telling customers who purchased TV's that their set won't be any good next year. But I thought that was only regular TV's, not ones that purported to be digital. And I didn't think this con game was still going on after they got caught.

It turns out Sylvania misled when it said the TV is digital. Although it has a digital setting, it needs a converter box to pick up digital video. Sears did not tell me this. The documents we got off the Internet featured a letter from the FCC to a Sears in Texas about this very model of TV, warning Sears it had to tell customers they'd need a box to use it, even though it was labeled as digital.

Didn't Sears learn a fucking thing from being slapped by the FCC??? I think the sales staff at Sears just didn't know any better. So the real blame lies with the store management and with Sylvania for being so misleading.

So I returned the TV, got my money back, and got a different brand at H.H. Gregg instead.

The set I got today works about as well as you could hope for, which is better than yesterday's set. We're still going to have to deal with the reception problems though (which I expected). I can tell already digital TV isn't going to go over too well when people see what it's like. Fortunately, today's set also has an analog setting for when digital goes the way of videodiscs (which I seriously believe is going to happen).