I’ve decided I will never buy another inkjet printer. I just passed my third one, an Epson 740, to Kevin, after getting so fed up with it this weekend that it nearly ended up in the garage under my 5 pound sledge. I decided to buy a laser printer, a Samsung ML-1710 that I had been eyeing for a couple of months. After some research I bought it from BestBuy.com and during the checkout process they noted that if I wanted I could do in-store pickup and not have to wait for the shipping. Sounded good, I went for it. This was Thursday last week. The printer had a rebate on it which expired on Saturday. Bestbuy promptly sent me an email telling me my order was in process and as soon as they confirmed availablity at my local store, they’d email me. This gave me pause, since they had just told me it was available during the checkout process, but whatever, I wasn’t planning to pick it up until Saturday.

Except Saturday rolled around and still no confirmation email. Finally I called them, a frustrating process since never in their phone hell voicemail tree do they mention how to get a hold of a person, and none of the choices were about cancelling orders, but ultimately I prevailed and cancelled the order when the person couldn’t confirm to me that my printer would be ready that day. I then went with plan B, which was to pickup the printer at Circuit City. Went through the same process of ordering online, including selecting in-store pickup, then drove to Circuit City and got my printer. Out of curiousity, I checked Best Buy since it’s right near the Circuit City, and they had a stack of at least 10 Samsung 1710’s sitting on the shelf. The lesson here is Best Buy sucks – don’t use their in-store pickup function. I am at least partly convinced this was intentional on their part – the printer was $20 cheaper at Best Buy, which had a $120 rebate compared to Circuit City’s $100, but which only lasted for 3 days – my bet is they would have given me my printer the day after the rebate expired. Or maybe they’re just technically incompetent, or ruled by their marketing department, which saw Circuit City’s advertising blitz for their in-store pickup feature during the NFL season and decided they needed to offer it too even if they couldn’t actually accomplish it with anything resembling efficiency. Whatever. Ultimately I don’t care, aside from knowing I won’t try using it again.

[the printer’s great so far, btw. Fast, relatively quiet, excellent output quality]