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This is a rather epic tale of multiple SCs with a few hints of cursing out coworkers and a dash of Morons in management, just for good measure.
Unlike other stories, this was not resolved in a day, or even a week. It took MONTHS to clean the mess up.
So what happened?
In a word: Chaos.
Background
Most gamers are familiar with the infamous Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death (RROD) error that plagued the system in its first several years of release. I worked at a games store pretty much non-stop from the console launch to late 2008 when our story takes place.
Unfortunately, it wasn't until 2009 when Microsoft FINALLY started releasing consoles that were highly RROD resistant so you may be able to see where this is going.
But to simply chalk up the 2008 disaster to Microsoft's crappy engineering would be oversimplifying things.
The Story
Video games always sell big during the holidays and consoles are no exception. A lot of systems go out the door in the months leading up to Christmas.
Back in July, we might have had 20 Xbox 360s lying around for days waiting to sell. At holiday time, we can sometimes sell that many in a matter of HOURS. As a result, stock is usually tight. It's quite common for certain versions of consoles to sell out completely as Christmas nears.
Now, our games store sells used games and consoles. People like this, it saves them money. Again notice the time frame here. Late 2008...the same time that the economic mess was going on and the stock market was plummeting faster than the temperatures in Toronto on a February morning. This meant people didn't have exactly have a fortune to spend on Christmas shopping that year. Hence they bought used systems. A LOT of used systems.
And herein lies our main problem: Our games store accepted consoles for trade in, including broken units. So of course it was common for people to trade in RROD units that were otherwise little more than sleek looking paperweights. The units were then sent to a repair center to be fixed up so they could be resold.
Unfortunately the repair center did an absolutely AWFUL job at repairing the consoles.
The consoles would come three to a box, but instead of being boxed within a box like most consoles, these units were, for some reason I've never being able to figure out, packed in a kind of hard plastic case with a handle on top. Think of like a cheap see through plastic briefcase you can carry a game console in and you'll have an idea what I mean.
Oh and did I mention the consoles were shipped with NO PACKING MATERIAL whatsoever?
All of these things meant that these rebuilt 360 units were practically useless. I'm not lying when I say the failure rate on these things was astronomical. It was common that we would get 10 units shipped and 8 would come back defective. That's the kind of failure rate that would cost people their jobs in other companies. Every time I went into the back room I'd see a stack of 360s usually six or seven units high piled up in our “send for repair” bin.
Over and over and over we saw the same thing happening...
Customer buys a rebuilt 360, only to bring it back days later saying it didn't work (typically due to RROD).
Console gets swapped out, usually for another rebuilt unit (because it's all we had in stock)
Replacement unit RRODs, customer returns again.
By this point, it's either yet ANOTHER replacement, or a refund followed by a reaming out about our shoddy products.
Of course we all know that it's aggravating to return something multiple times. Try dealing with SCs of this nature multiple times a day (sometimes multiple times an hour) for weeks on end and you get an idea of how burned out I was by the time New Year's rolled around.
From about the middle of October to the end of December it was non stop. Every few days, a new shipment of rebuilt units, every time the vast majority would be returned to us within days if not hours.
It was so frustrating. Clearly the bean counters realized how high the failure rate on these things was and how much money was being spent endlessly shipping them back and forth from the stores to the repair center and vice-versa so why didn't somebody DO something??
One of my coworkers at the time didn't help matters by “accidentally” reselling a few consoles that should have been marked as not in working order and sent back. He did this because he could tack on upsells to these sales and boost his numbers. He was eventually caught, but ended up keeping his job.
As for the Morons in management suck. Not only was corporate apparently deaf to our repeated complaints about the shoddy repair work on the 360s and the customer headaches it was causing, they actually had the audacity to blame US for a drop in customer satisfaction ratings. Well now, gee I wonder what could be making the customers so upset...hmmm...
It eventually got the point where I did something I don't usually like doing: I recommended customers NOT buy from us. If they came in looking for a used 360 and all we had were rebuilt units I would inform of them of this, but then promptly say something to the effect of: “Unfortunately I don't feel comfortable selling you console because we've had a lot of problems with them. If you still want it that's fine but I'm warning you there's a good chance you'll end up bringing it right back.”
This stopped a lot of sales, it also no doubt saved us a lot of customer service headaches. Normally my manager would not condone such things, but she was as frustrated by the whole deal as the rest of us and didn't mind that we tried to prevent customers from buying those consoles.
Of course we had more fun the week after Christmas because obviously some of these consoles were purchased as Christmas gifts and not used until that time. So we had yet another wave of defective systems being returned and unfortunately at this point in time we had practically nothing to replace them with. Some customers got new consoles instead, some got refunds, some we had to send to other locations of ours for replacement systems. It was a mess. Of course not everybody had proper receipts which further compounded matters.
Predictably things died down in the new year, though the quality of the rebuilt units didn't improve. One slow day, I decided to send an e-mail to the head of the repair center. In it, I (politely) vented about the 360 issues that were going on and simply requested that greater attention needed to be given in properly repairing the systems. I identified myself in the email, I had no problem accepting responsibility for it.
Imagine my surprise when the repair center guy actually calls the store a few days later to talk to me about the email! But that was nothing compared to the next surprise I received: The repair center guy flat out told me they didn't know how to properly fix RROD systems and that's why all the problems were happening.
Yes, REALLY.
My mind was blown at that point.
Surely he hadn't kept this secret from everyone else in the company. I mean he must have told someone else before telling a lowly store lackey like me...right?
I certainly hope so. My guess is he told someone repeatedly and was ignored or brushed off...at least for awhile.
By that summer it seemed like someone in the company had gotten the message in some form. The failure rate on the rebuilt consoles had dropped and they were now being shipped in proper boxes rather than those plastic abominations (which, I might add caused myself and my coworkers a great deal of unnecessary finger bleeds).
But I suspect the real reason for the improvement was when the company decided to no longer accept RROD systems for trade.
What a great solution! If only someone would have thought of that sooner...
I've never had another experience that was as wide ranging and caused so many SCs as the great Holiday Horror of 2008 and I sincerely never hope to again.
Unlike other stories, this was not resolved in a day, or even a week. It took MONTHS to clean the mess up.
So what happened?
In a word: Chaos.
Background
Most gamers are familiar with the infamous Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death (RROD) error that plagued the system in its first several years of release. I worked at a games store pretty much non-stop from the console launch to late 2008 when our story takes place.
Unfortunately, it wasn't until 2009 when Microsoft FINALLY started releasing consoles that were highly RROD resistant so you may be able to see where this is going.
But to simply chalk up the 2008 disaster to Microsoft's crappy engineering would be oversimplifying things.
The Story
Video games always sell big during the holidays and consoles are no exception. A lot of systems go out the door in the months leading up to Christmas.
Back in July, we might have had 20 Xbox 360s lying around for days waiting to sell. At holiday time, we can sometimes sell that many in a matter of HOURS. As a result, stock is usually tight. It's quite common for certain versions of consoles to sell out completely as Christmas nears.
Now, our games store sells used games and consoles. People like this, it saves them money. Again notice the time frame here. Late 2008...the same time that the economic mess was going on and the stock market was plummeting faster than the temperatures in Toronto on a February morning. This meant people didn't have exactly have a fortune to spend on Christmas shopping that year. Hence they bought used systems. A LOT of used systems.
And herein lies our main problem: Our games store accepted consoles for trade in, including broken units. So of course it was common for people to trade in RROD units that were otherwise little more than sleek looking paperweights. The units were then sent to a repair center to be fixed up so they could be resold.
Unfortunately the repair center did an absolutely AWFUL job at repairing the consoles.
The consoles would come three to a box, but instead of being boxed within a box like most consoles, these units were, for some reason I've never being able to figure out, packed in a kind of hard plastic case with a handle on top. Think of like a cheap see through plastic briefcase you can carry a game console in and you'll have an idea what I mean.
Oh and did I mention the consoles were shipped with NO PACKING MATERIAL whatsoever?
All of these things meant that these rebuilt 360 units were practically useless. I'm not lying when I say the failure rate on these things was astronomical. It was common that we would get 10 units shipped and 8 would come back defective. That's the kind of failure rate that would cost people their jobs in other companies. Every time I went into the back room I'd see a stack of 360s usually six or seven units high piled up in our “send for repair” bin.
Over and over and over we saw the same thing happening...
Customer buys a rebuilt 360, only to bring it back days later saying it didn't work (typically due to RROD).
Console gets swapped out, usually for another rebuilt unit (because it's all we had in stock)
Replacement unit RRODs, customer returns again.
By this point, it's either yet ANOTHER replacement, or a refund followed by a reaming out about our shoddy products.
Of course we all know that it's aggravating to return something multiple times. Try dealing with SCs of this nature multiple times a day (sometimes multiple times an hour) for weeks on end and you get an idea of how burned out I was by the time New Year's rolled around.
From about the middle of October to the end of December it was non stop. Every few days, a new shipment of rebuilt units, every time the vast majority would be returned to us within days if not hours.
It was so frustrating. Clearly the bean counters realized how high the failure rate on these things was and how much money was being spent endlessly shipping them back and forth from the stores to the repair center and vice-versa so why didn't somebody DO something??
One of my coworkers at the time didn't help matters by “accidentally” reselling a few consoles that should have been marked as not in working order and sent back. He did this because he could tack on upsells to these sales and boost his numbers. He was eventually caught, but ended up keeping his job.
As for the Morons in management suck. Not only was corporate apparently deaf to our repeated complaints about the shoddy repair work on the 360s and the customer headaches it was causing, they actually had the audacity to blame US for a drop in customer satisfaction ratings. Well now, gee I wonder what could be making the customers so upset...hmmm...
It eventually got the point where I did something I don't usually like doing: I recommended customers NOT buy from us. If they came in looking for a used 360 and all we had were rebuilt units I would inform of them of this, but then promptly say something to the effect of: “Unfortunately I don't feel comfortable selling you console because we've had a lot of problems with them. If you still want it that's fine but I'm warning you there's a good chance you'll end up bringing it right back.”
This stopped a lot of sales, it also no doubt saved us a lot of customer service headaches. Normally my manager would not condone such things, but she was as frustrated by the whole deal as the rest of us and didn't mind that we tried to prevent customers from buying those consoles.
Of course we had more fun the week after Christmas because obviously some of these consoles were purchased as Christmas gifts and not used until that time. So we had yet another wave of defective systems being returned and unfortunately at this point in time we had practically nothing to replace them with. Some customers got new consoles instead, some got refunds, some we had to send to other locations of ours for replacement systems. It was a mess. Of course not everybody had proper receipts which further compounded matters.
Predictably things died down in the new year, though the quality of the rebuilt units didn't improve. One slow day, I decided to send an e-mail to the head of the repair center. In it, I (politely) vented about the 360 issues that were going on and simply requested that greater attention needed to be given in properly repairing the systems. I identified myself in the email, I had no problem accepting responsibility for it.
Imagine my surprise when the repair center guy actually calls the store a few days later to talk to me about the email! But that was nothing compared to the next surprise I received: The repair center guy flat out told me they didn't know how to properly fix RROD systems and that's why all the problems were happening.
Yes, REALLY.
My mind was blown at that point.
Surely he hadn't kept this secret from everyone else in the company. I mean he must have told someone else before telling a lowly store lackey like me...right?
I certainly hope so. My guess is he told someone repeatedly and was ignored or brushed off...at least for awhile.
By that summer it seemed like someone in the company had gotten the message in some form. The failure rate on the rebuilt consoles had dropped and they were now being shipped in proper boxes rather than those plastic abominations (which, I might add caused myself and my coworkers a great deal of unnecessary finger bleeds).
But I suspect the real reason for the improvement was when the company decided to no longer accept RROD systems for trade.
What a great solution! If only someone would have thought of that sooner...
I've never had another experience that was as wide ranging and caused so many SCs as the great Holiday Horror of 2008 and I sincerely never hope to again.
I AM the evil bastard!
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