Year: 2009

DealExtreme Dispute

I seem to be getting into a lot of disputes lately. Last month I ordered a pretty little flashlight from DealExtreme. I was pretty happy with the batteries and charger I bought from them previously and this light got some good reviews. It takes 1 AAA battery like my tiny flashlight, but it is stainless steel with a brass ring that looks real sharp. It also has a tail power button and remembers the last mode it was in. This means if you had the light on High before, it will come on in High again. I like that. The tiny flashlight always comes on at Medium, then Low, then High. Most of the time I want High. This light has three modes, but one is strobe (pretty useless). So I would have to skip over that one. And the low is 80 lumens instead of the high of 150 lumens. I would like for the low to be lower, maybe 20 lumens (turns out to be about 10 lumens).

Anyway, it was only $13.80 shipped from China, so I thought I’d try it out. I ordered it November 1 and although DealExtreme said it was available in a few days, I didn’t get a shipping notice until November 10. Once shipped, they said the light should arrive in 5-10 working days (ignoring the favorable part of their range, that’s two weeks, or November 24). Well that didn’t happen, so I gave them another week and still nothing. They have an online form where you can tell them the item never arrived and they are supposed to get back to you in 24-48 hours. However, 48 hours later I hadn’t heard anything. Every day I’m checking my mail and now I’m checking my DX account to see if they are trying to contact me. Nothing.

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Peace Corps 2010 Reunion

This is a place where Thai 92 people can write information about a possible reunion in 2010. Starting off, let’s see who is interested and offer a suggestion for a general place. Then we can figure out a week. Then maybe we can actually get a head count and make a reservation. I think Marci and Julian should be in charge.

I’ll start out. I’m interested and will go just about anywhere. My only conflict is June 6-12.

Please post a comment below and we’ll see what happens . . .

eBay Dispute

Generally I haven’t had problems with buying things on eBay. I typically don’t buy from eBay when I want new items because the bids often get beyond what I can buy the same thing for online or in stores. But I needed some lithium batteries and they’re hard to get a deal on, partly because I think Energizer has a patent on them so there is no competition. So before I bought them in a store I thought I’d look on eBay. The Buy It Now prices were all higher than in stores, but I found a couple of auctions ending the next day that still didn’t have any bids (turned out they were 1-day auctions), so I figured I had nothing to lose and bid $1.25 (8 batteries would be $16 in the store) plus there would be $3.50 shipping. I was winning. Within a couple of hours I had been outbid, but the same seller had two other auctions ending at the same time with no bids. Why fight against someone else? So I bid $5 on another one and got beat pretty quickly. Now I had to think how much was it really worth? One scary thing was the seller had only been online for a month, with 15 sales, most of which were purchases. The items sold included some cosmetics and a couple of baseball cards. I wondered where a person would get these batteries and thought maybe they just steal them. How hard would it be to pocket some batteries in a drug store and then sell them on eBay? But I knew with eBay and PayPal that really not that much could go wrong and I would be protected. I needed the batteries and they were going to cost $16 plus maybe $1 tax at the store, so if I subtracted out shipping I could bid up to $13.50, so I bid $8.90 which held against a number of other bids until the next day. Soon I was beaten again, so I bid on the third one for $11.15 and this held, bumping up a dollar or so to beat a last second bid, with the auction ending at $10.50 (the other two finished at $9 and $9.50). So I won and would still save $3. It was a far cry from getting them for $1.25, but eBay does an amazing job of finding a price.

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