High Street Cowboys (Radio Rentals)

Member Name: yhwman

Product:	Radio Rentals
Date:	11/03/01 (655 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good initial deal

Disadvantages: Every day since the day we bought it

I was a happy young chap. I’d got onto the second year of my course at university and I’d got out of university accommodation and into a house. A house with people of my choosing no less! As we were all friends prior to living together we bought quite a lot of ‘stuff’ for the house between us. One of these was an ex rental TV. 24” with Fasttext and a three month warranty for £100 plus £10 delivery. Not bad eh? Sure, the remote control seems to work in slow motion but it’s only a little thing. Anyway, several months after buying the TV it threw a fit and refused to do anything other than sound like the percussion from an early and angry Nine Inch Nails song. Every attempt to turn it on produced a fast thumping noise with the display flashing ‘11’. No idea why 11, maybe it’s the TV’s lucky number. Anyway, we phoned up Radio Rentals and yes we could get it fixed for free. Only catch was they would charge us £50 to either collect it or send someone out to fix it. Bit of a con but was said we’d bring it in ourselves and to be fair to Radio Rentals they let us take it to a shop that was easier to get to than where we bought it. One taxi and £4 later it was in the shop. After a week in the shop the TV was fixed and yet another taxi and yet another £4 later it was back at the house and working.

All was fine and dandy for a month or so and then last week the TV started doing the same thing, only this time it was out of warranty. Remembering how much Radio Rentals wanted just to pick the TV up we hit the yellow pages in search of someone local. Yesterday they turned up (Which was when they were supposed to) and took one look at the problem and said “Your transformer’s gone”. I told the guy that came round that the TV had done it before but been repaired under warranty. His reply made me furious! (Not at him, it’s Radio Rentals I’m slating here :P). It seems that a dodgy t
ransformer can be fixed but it will break again shortly after and will have to be replaced at some point anyway. So good old Radio Rentals fixed the TV sufficiently well for it to go out of warranty. Nice people huh? First they want to charge us £50 for a ‘free’ repair and then they only fix it so well it’ll last until it’s out of warranty and we can go back to them and they can charge us more.

I’m still pretty angry about this and I don’t think I can sum the opinion up without using bad language so I’m just going to leave it there.

Summary: