posted September 22, 2009 12:24 PM PDT

I don't work for a non-profit organization

Stop reading now. This is another blog post about my job.


So we offer a repair service. It's a flat $99. You have the option of upgrading the hard drive in the DVR at the same time or not. The drives start at $99. If you don't want to upgrade your drive, there's an extra $30 charge, for a total of $129. Why? Because now I have to test the fuck out of the drive you're supplying. That's why. We're still going to charge you $30 even if this drive is one that we sold you a couple months ago. Why? Because by the time it gets to us, it's been manhandled by you, a few package handlers, and god knows what else it's been through. So I still have to test the fuck out of it. If I was pulling a new drive out of the box before doing your repair, I'm saving myself and my dedicated diagnostics PCs a few hours. I only have six of those, and they're always testing drives. ALWAYS.

Additionally, we make NO money on repair. 9 out of 10 repairs end up going to a 3rd party facility for component level repair that I can't do. That costs us $80, plus another $15 in shipping. The only reason we offer it for basically $4 over cost is to boost sales of our drives and keep more old Tivos in service. If it was much more than that, people would just buy new DVRs, and probably not from us. So if we're not selling a new drive at the same time, then it's a loss. This is not a charity, and my time is not free. You're paying $30 either in profit on the new drive we sell, or as an extra charge for the repair work.

I tried to tell my boss that he should just make the repair $129, and offer $30 off of the drives. He seems to think that people will be too put off if they see that the repair costs that much. But it does cost that much already, so I don't get it...

Anyway, I posted this because I just got off the phone with somebody trying to talk their way out of paying that $30. Maybe I'll talk to my boss again about this.

last updated September 22, 2009 1:06 PM PDT