With my dad recently passing, I finally decided to leave the country for greener pastures down south and to take care of family. So, my wife and I started selling all our belongings, furniture, electronics, and most stuff that won’t fit in 32″ duffel bags. More than 10 years living in America, you can rack up a lot of stuff. This included a Sony BRAVIA XBR Series KDL-46XBR9 46-Inch 1080p 240Hz LCD HDTV.
Right now, there is one same model TV on Amazon selling for $900 used. I had it listed on Amazon for less than that. I ended up just selling it to a childhood buddy of mine but before I could remove it from Amazon someone else purchased it through the Amazon website. I had to cancel that Amazon order and ended up selling it to my friend for $660. I figured it would cost me around 100 bucks to ship it to my friend, so I could get around $560 for the TV then. I started looking for quotes, and found out that USPS will not even ship it because it was so big. UPS would charge me $130 and FEDEX quoted me at $105. So, I opened up an account with FEDEX, gave them my credit card, printed a label, taped it to the side of box, and scheduled a pick up. However, when I entered all the shipping information, I left the declared value empty. I thought they didn’t need to know that. But, apparently they need to know that so that they know how much to take CARE of it.
I had kept up all the original TV packaging and boxes as I was planning on selling it in the future. So, it was as well packed as SONY would pack it. However, when the box got to my friend, it looked like FEDEX tried to destroy the TV as much as possible. Then things started to get weird, instead of FEDEX charging me the $105 they had quoted me, they charged me $50.17. Their customer support was just horrible, every time I would call, I would get a different answer. My friend offered to do the claim since I was so busy moving and they told him they will cover the $660 he paid for the TV but of course that turned out to be a lie. I then call at one point to check out the status of the claim and FEDEX customer support told me that my friend could not file the claim and that I had to do it. I hung up and called again and finally got a guy that said the claim was processing and to wait some more days. He still couldn’t answer why my credit card was not charged what they had quoted me but he said it would be reimbursed.
Something I thought was idiotic on FEDEX’s part is that it is their protocol to ship the damaged item back to the shipper. I tried to tell them I cannot do anything with that broken TV and to save their time and money and not ship a broken TV back to me because all I can do is throw it away. But, apparently they needed to inspect it to make sure the TV was broken. Not that you couldn’t tell by the fact the box looked like it was dropped on water for an hour to the point it could not even stand on its own. Even more idiotic is that I saw a pending charge of $8 from FEDEX on my credit card for the cost of the return but thankfully it never went through. When the TV got back to my apartment it was ridiculous how the FEDEX guy just dropped it on the front door rang the bell and ran back to the truck. It would have been nice if he had stuck around to throw it out for me. When the claim was finally done almost two weeks later. All I got was a check from FEDEX for $150.17. Their excuse for not paying what they broke is because I did not declare the value of the item, and their standard is a $100 + shipping cost.
Here are some pictures of what FEDEX did to the TV and a gem I found on YouTube.
[youtube_sc url=http://youtu.be/PKUDTPbDhnA]