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Adventures in impulse buying
Jan. 17th, 2005 12:22 amI got burned on an impulse purchase this past week. I stopped by CostCo on Monday to pick something up for my sister and found myself receiving a coupon sheet as I walked through the door. CostCo doesn't do coupons nearly so often as other stores do, but when I looked at the sheet it included a chance for $20 on a Rave MP sports model mp3 player.
Now I do have an Sony net-MD player, but it has two disadvantages. First is that it doesn't have a belt clip or armband, you're supposed to slip in a pocket, which isn't nice when it comes time for exercising. The other problem is the annoyance of Sony's user support. I had reinstall windows a while back and discovered afterwards that I had misplaced the CD that came with the MD player.
The Rave MP came with both a belt clip and an arm band. Better, since the computer would see it as a 256 Mb hard drive I would be able to transfer music without even needing to touch any special software.
Worked great for a day. Second day it would only maintain a usb connection for about twenty seconds. Third day it would only display the logo on the screen when it was switched on. CostCo, I am glad to say, has a very friendly returns policy. The guy asked what was wrong and then without any trouble at all asked if I wanted to exchange it or get a refund.
Once again I find myself wishing that Sony hadn't so mishandled the minidisc. It should have replaced the audio tape, but in trying to over control how the medium was used Sony kept it from being anything but a niche player in the US market.
Now I do have an Sony net-MD player, but it has two disadvantages. First is that it doesn't have a belt clip or armband, you're supposed to slip in a pocket, which isn't nice when it comes time for exercising. The other problem is the annoyance of Sony's user support. I had reinstall windows a while back and discovered afterwards that I had misplaced the CD that came with the MD player.
The Rave MP came with both a belt clip and an arm band. Better, since the computer would see it as a 256 Mb hard drive I would be able to transfer music without even needing to touch any special software.
Worked great for a day. Second day it would only maintain a usb connection for about twenty seconds. Third day it would only display the logo on the screen when it was switched on. CostCo, I am glad to say, has a very friendly returns policy. The guy asked what was wrong and then without any trouble at all asked if I wanted to exchange it or get a refund.
Once again I find myself wishing that Sony hadn't so mishandled the minidisc. It should have replaced the audio tape, but in trying to over control how the medium was used Sony kept it from being anything but a niche player in the US market.
