Wasteful consumer lifestyle update.

We took the broken DVD/TV back to the store yesterday. We didn't have the receipt, but the product was made exclusively for this particular retailer in their sweatshops in China, and we had had a raincheck, so there was a docket sticky-taped to the box with our name and the price on it.

So we get to the customer service counter and there are two teenaged girls running the show. The one looking after us is fine with the whole thing, especially since the treatment upon return is the same whether there's a receipt or not - replace it, no questions asked; leading me to suspect that these crappy cheap things breakdown all the time. Unfortunately, we have a disc stuck in it, but it's a DVD-R we recorded ourselves, so it's not a real big loss.

But there aren't any left in stock, so she has to do a credit voucher. When she swipes the doovy over the barcode, it rings up as $379. We paid $249. She knows we paid $249. "We'll pretend we didn't see this," she says, pulling the raincheck slip off the box...

So we had $379 to replace the bedroom TV and DVD player. We spent $80+$229 in the end. We were only looking for a mega-cheap DVD player - with one specific requirement - it had to be multi-zone.

I was a little impatient, so we got a bit of a bad deal - the TV only has one audio input! What TV sold in 2006 is mono? Apparently this one. There was a TV we liked better for $20 more, but they didn't have any out the back. There might have been some at other stores, but we were at that one, and really, I just wanted to get it over and done with; we'd gone back to the store once - twice if you count the original time when we were issued with the raincheck.

And the DVD was multi-zone, so we can now play half our collection again.

Now, the lounge room DVD player, which we bought for $50 at Aldi when everything else in the house crapped it is starting to freeze up on some DVD-Rs we did. Oh, the problems of needing so much stuff...

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