Customer Service: HP vs Costco

I had a problem with my HP printer the other day. This was a new OfficeJet that we bought in February, because we wanted a wireless printer. Our previous HP had worked fine for years, so I didn't feel bad about buying another HP.

Boy did that change last week. About a week after replacing the print cartridge for the first time, it started complaining that an incompatible ink cartridge was installed. After running out of ideas from their website, I called HP technical support, who rather quickly decided to send me a new printer. This seemed crazy to me...how did they know it was the printer and not the cartridge? Oh well, I figured they knew what they were doing.

They didn't. After receiving the printer, I was required to install my old ink cartridge, after which the new printer gave me the same incompatible cartridge error. I called HP, thinking they would quickly send me out a new ink cartridge, and we would be done with it.

Once again, they didn't. They wanted me go through all the same troubleshooting steps I did the first time. When I refused on the basis that I had already done it all, they said they could do nothing to help me. I have to admit that I became the stereotypical furious consumer at that point. Through the course of the call I was put on hold for long periods of time, was told that I could not speak to a supervisor or manager, and was refused when I requested any way to identify the person I was speaking to (all he would tell me that his name was Richard). Finally while being put on hold, I went ahead and did the troubleshooting again just to get this call over with. After I told this to "Richard," I was placed on hold and he never came back...

Wow.

After this I was so mad I packed everything up and hauled it back to Costco--four months after my purchase. I no longer had the original packaging, just a ziploc bag with all the manuals and cables. After spending at least two hours on the phone with HP, Costco took about two minutes to refund all of my money for my printer and the open pack of ink I had purchased. This gave me almost the exact amount of money that I needed in order to buy a new Canon Pixma printer (from Costco, of course).

After comparing the HP OfficeJet J4680 I returned to the Canon Pixma MX860, there is no comparison between the two. Everything about the Canon build quality and feature set is superior to the HP. I don't feel like going into the details, but compared to the Canon, the HP just seems like something the HP "engineers" churned out as fast as possible without regard to quality.

Two things I learned from this:

1. Just because a company's products were once good, doesn't mean they will stay that way.

2. Costco's return policy rocks. After this experience I want to make all my major purchases Costco, even if it is a bit more expensive (which it usually is not).