Let the Bottom Fall Out of PC World

PC World do some generic re-manufactured ink cartridges for a variety of printers. Good value, you may think, when asked to pay the frankly obscene prices charged by the printer manufacturers.

Having to do a lot of printing some months ago, I popped into the Exeter branch of PC World and purchased two colour and two black printer cartridges for my Canon Pixma iP1800.  The approved Canon cartridges cost £19.99 each for colour, and £15.15 each for black. The PCW Essentials ink cartridges cost £14.99 and £13.99 each respectively - so a considerable saving seems to be possible. Great! Approx. £70 from Canon, approx. £56 from PC World. Saving approx. £14 (or 5 pints of good bitter in my local pub). Rejoice!

Well, not quite. When I installed the first set of cartridges, they seemed to work OK. The colour was a bit iffy, certainly not up to the standard of Canon's output. But you pays your money...

Then the black cartridge started a slow leak - splodging inky droplets onto every page, smudging into what looked like dirty lines over each page. No amount of cartridge/roller cleaning would get rid of it. But I soldiered on (by this time the 5 pints of bitter were gone, drunk in a desperate bid to alleviate my disappointment).

Finally, the cartridges ran out. I replaced them with the second set. Black worked fine! "Huzzah!", I yelled in the approved theatrical Shakespearian manner. But the colour cartridge? Nada. Nuffink. Pining for the fiords.

So I repacked it into its shiny PC World packaging...


...and took it back to the store.

I was dealt with by a very nice young lady. She asked me for my postcode. I gave it to her. She said she couldn't find any record of this purchase under my address. I said, "so what?". "How do we know you purchased this item from us?", she demanded. I pointed out that the item was packaged and branded by PC World and I couldn't have purchased it anywhere else. She then asked my to go through my bank statements and bring in a photocopy of the transaction, otherwise she wouldn't give me a refund.

I had already driven 14 miles to Exeter PC World. I told her to forget the whole thing, and to keep the defective cartridge as a pleasant reminder of good customer relations. I also asked her to check the average amount that I spend at PC World per month, and that I would now be shopping for essential computer supplies elsewhere.

PC World have forgotten the important truth that good experiences are remembered, and bad ones reported to others. I won't be using them again - and have already sourced replacements that are less expensive online. PC World Essentials? Rubbish products, rubbish quality. And rubbish customer service.