

Microsoft suggests customer donate extra X-Box they sent him. - ryanmolden
http://consumerist.com/2011/12/microsoft-spreads-the-holiday-spirit-by-telling-me-to-donate-extra-xbox-at-their-expense.html

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gustavo_duarte
Very cool. Had it been Paypal, they'd want a picture of a burned X-Box
surrounded by crying children to prove authenticity.

MS has been controversial commercially, but socially I think they've done a
decent job of "Don't Be Evil", for example in their treatment of Gay and
Lesbian employees -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_and_Lesbian_Employees_at_Mi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_and_Lesbian_Employees_at_Microsoft)

~~~
GigabyteCoin
PayPal once refunded me out of their own pocket for a seller's obvious
mistake. This was for about $30 USD and only a few months ago. I was blown
away.

PayPal isn't all bad.

~~~
eridius
Are you sure they didn't charge the seller that $30? That seems to be PayPal's
standard practice.

~~~
GigabyteCoin
Quite sure.

I believe PayPal refunded me simply so I wouldn't sue them... but who knows?

Here is the lowdown...

I purchased ~10 1500W rated ATX power cords on ebay from a seller in china.

I fired up 2-3 servers and the cords literally started smoking/melting under
~300 watts of load.

Upon dissection of the cords, it was obvious they were fakes and would never
be able to stand 1500 watts of load. They were all comprised of hundreds of
30+ gauge wires.

Long story short... I had to pay for shipment back to china in order to
receive a refund.

I wrote to paypal in my furious state, explaining how the seller had nearly
burnt down my home (what if the cables went as soon as I stepped out for a
smoke?)... and they refunded me literally out of their own pocket.

They said [sic] ... "typically you must return the items but in this case we
will refund the payment for you".

I wrote them back wishing the seller would have been reprimanded some how or
have had to felt the loss but that was the last I heard from them.

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patio11
Props to Microsoft, but this is actually pretty routine. (It was literally
written policy at a previous employer of mine.)

Manual exception handling at the warehouse is _crazily_ expensive. It is much,
much easier to write it off (as shrinkage, not charity) than to get the item
back into active inventory (all the fun of chasing invoices, except the amount
payable is "one XBox", and the person doing the chasing sees their general
productivity go to pot), particularly as it may have been opened. The charity
suggestion removes many customer objections and ends the ongoing CS expense
almost immediately.

~~~
gustavo_duarte
Agreed, but the charity bit was a special touch:

    
    
      In the spirit of the season, you might consider 
      donating it to the charity of your choice
    

Beats a standard "you keep it" corporate letter.

~~~
patio11
Just staying, our literally written policy was "Offer DDD": donate, destroy,
or "dispose of" (a polite euphemism for "You keep it") the misshipped item. I
would have added the Christmas flourish if I were saying it in December, too,
but the options would have been the same in July. (n.b. The business does not
care what you do. We want to convey, in the politest possible way, that we
both don't want it and don't want to talk to you about it.)

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jmduke
While this is obviously great (and it's wonderful to see this sort of action
more often from companies) it's no-brainer PR: the cost of a 360 (retailing
for around $300 nowadays) for a positive spot in Consumerist.

~~~
brk
Not to mention whoever it gets donated to is likely going to end up spending
$1000+ over the lifetime on games, accessories, subscriptions, etc.

It's a nice gesture, yes, but I still doubt they will be "out" anything for it
in the long run.

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dholowiski
I used to work for a company that shipped products. It was a pain in the butt
to have customers ship stuff back to us, even if we sent them 2 or 3 of
something by mistake. We did this all the time. Well handled though.

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reptile83
Some of you might be surprised but MSFT provides some of the best costomer
service. A good friend of mine built his PC and once a week it would blue
screen. He spent hours trying to figure out which hardware component caused it
but gave up and called MSFT. Their CS rep spent 2 hours on the phone with my
friend until they figured out what the issue was. The guy gave steps to fix
the issue, without having to buy anything and even called the next week to
verify that it didn't happen again. They did all that for free. PROPS!

------
dsrikanth
That is very good on Microsoft's part. I guess they are finally catching up on
Bill Gate's philanthropy route :)

~~~
seanos
Very good on Timothy's part too. In the same situation, I would probably sell
the extra XBox to be honest.

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absconditus
Does this really need to be discussed on HN?

~~~
ryanmolden
I thought so. It shows a good way to turn a mistake into a positive PR story,
valuable for startups to understand imo.

As others have pointed out the cost of this for Microsoft is miniscule
compared to both the positive press from Consumerist and the, likely, positive
word of mouth of the person who got the extra X-Box.

I'll admit it isn't the 'normal' fare of "Startup X lands 90 kajillion dollars
to build Facebook-GroupOn-Twitter Mashup 2.0 in Ruby/Erlang/Go!!" or "New
proof of Tychonoff's theorem", but you know, everyone has different tastes and
I do love me some variety of time wasting stories to read while my code
compiles.

~~~
sukuriant
I am now curious. Is there ever a " _grumble_ Why is this on HN?" that is
upvoted?

~~~
ryanmolden
I doubt it, it doesn't substantially add to any discussion except to indicate
you feel the discussion is pointless (unlike everyone else contributing).

For people that see something they are not interested in they can always flag
the submission as abusive (though that is a bit extreme) or simply, you know,
not click on the article/discussion link.

I see lots of stories on the front page that don't interest me, I simply don't
read them or upvote them. If the community at large disagrees with my
assesment and chooses to upvote/comment on the stories, so be it.

