PSA: Beware of buying the Mi Box from Walmart

[Jazmac]

My Amazon Firestick could no longer get a signal for some odd reason so I decided to replace it with the Mi Box.


I found these at Walmart, grabbed it from the shelf and took it to the counter. I plunked down the 70 bucks plus tax and the Wal-Mart dude went about unlocking that spider net security thing and stuck it in the bag. I got home and opened to box and my jaw droppped. The box was empty. Which is really odd since I watched him remove the security stuff. Now my problem is convincing the people at Walmart that they sold me an empty box.

After a bit of explaining my case, the manager said I should go back and grab another one which I did. There were about 6 or 7 boxes on the shelf and the first one I picked up felt like the one I had. Out of curiosity, I grabbed another and he had some weight mine did not have. I grabbed another and it was light too. So I took what I had and went back to Customer service. They removed all 3 security bands and only one had the Mi Box in it. The others were empty.

I got lucky. But beware if you decide to get one that it has the plastic on it. Mine did not have the plastic, only the security band.

[Danielx64]

That a good reason why you should only buy something that is sealed in plastic or some other way.

[Shiranui]

And at no time did you think "this box is a little on the light side"?

 

Anyway, mine should be coming direct from China in a few days.

My son and I are looking forward to fiddling with it over the weekend.

[restroom]

2 hours ago, Shiranui said:

And at no time did you think "this box is a little on the light side"?

Without knowing the weight, why would he? I got an SSD at work the other day and instantly thought id made a mistake with the order as it was so light, but the drive in fact was just very light and I didn't realise as I hadn't handled an SSD before.

[FloatingFatMan]

If the box isn't sealed, open it BEFORE you leave the store, always.

 

[Jazmac]

5 hours ago, FloatingFatMan said:

If the box isn't sealed, open it BEFORE you leave the store, always.

 

Wal-Mart had its security band around it and it was locked.  Are you saying that isn't sufficient? 

[Jazmac]

11 hours ago, Shiranui said:

And at no time did you think "this box is a little on the light side"?

 

Anyway, mine should be coming direct from China in a few days.

My son and I are looking forward to fiddling with it over the weekend.

When I finally got one and got it home.  Setting it up was a breeze.  Installed Kodi and it is much better than my Firestick. Loads much faster.

[Buttus]

looks like a walmart employee has some miboxes on ebay!   lol

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

I try not to buy anything at Walmart.

[+Warwagon MVC]

I looked at one at walmart, few weeks ago. Scanned in the bar code and read some reviews online standing next to it. After reading the reviews decided not to buy one. It's to bad google stopped selling their Nexus player  .. Actually I bought 5 of those  ... gave 2 to my mom 1 to my gf and I have 2

[FloatingFatMan]

45 minutes ago, Jazmac said:

Wal-Mart had its security band around it and it was locked.  Are you saying that isn't sufficient? 

Well, given that the box was empty, along with several others, clearly it wasn't.

 

Probably, they were returns that the staff never bothered to actually check.

 

[Jazmac]

1 hour ago, FloatingFatMan said:

Well, given that the box was empty, along with several others, clearly it wasn't.

 

Probably, they were returns that the staff never bothered to actually check.

 

Quality control at Walmart isn't quality or control.  Which is why I try not to shop at Walmart or Sams.

[Gotenks98]

To put this into perspective I used to work at a gamestop that was around the street from a walmart a long time ago. For one point in time a huge chunk of our trade ins from repeat customers came from walmart's "off the truck special". Seriously we had a chick to trade in like 80 PS2 memory cards at one time for cash. It got so bad that gamestop's lost prevention had to impose rules on how much you can take in from a single customer at a time. This was to protect gamestop if trail from walmart lead there so the police wouldnt seize 90% of the used items there. While it was obvious where this stuff was coming from we couldn't do anything about it to let walmart know.

[Jazmac]

"off the truck specials"  lol.

[Jazmac]

6 hours ago, FloatingFatMan said:

Well, given that the box was empty, along with several others, clearly it wasn't.

 

Probably, they were returns that the staff never bothered to actually check.

 

Hindsight is still 20/20. You would think that going into a megastore like walmart and having items on the shelf for sale with theft prevention on deck would give the customer a sense that what they are buying will in fact be in the package. Who would have thought that I need to inspect my box of Capt'n Crunch to make sure they didn't fill it with Fruit Loops. Whoda thunk it?  jk. Besides, this is walmart after all. I should have known not to go in there in the first place.   

[Shiranui]

17 hours ago, restroom said:

Without knowing the weight, why would he? I got an SSD at work the other day and instantly thought id made a mistake with the order as it was so light, but the drive in fact was just very light and I didn't realise as I hadn't handled an SSD before.

I would imagine that the main unit (176.5g), power supply, a remote and two AAA batteries would weigh discernibly more than an empty box.

 

Having said that, I do sympathize. It's is perfectly reasonable for the customer to expect that they are not buying an empty box. I once bought a box of chocolates in Melbourne as a present. I was shocked when, back in Japan,  we opened the box only to find that exactly 50% of the chocolates were missing. (we emailed them and they kindly sent us a full box).

 

Now I shake everything.

Edited November 15, 2016 by Shiranui

[T3X4S]

Walmart - yuk.

[dragontology]

9 hours ago, Gotenks98 said:

To put this into perspective I used to work at a gamestop that was around the street from a walmart a long time ago. For one point in time a huge chunk of our trade ins from repeat customers came from walmart's "off the truck special". Seriously we had a chick to trade in like 80 PS2 memory cards at one time for cash. It got so bad that gamestop's lost prevention had to impose rules on how much you can take in from a single customer at a time. This was to protect gamestop if trail from walmart lead there so the police wouldnt seize 90% of the used items there. While it was obvious where this stuff was coming from we couldn't do anything about it to let walmart know.

This is somewhat ironic... I preordered Rockband 3 from GameStop. I don't know why. Music gaming had passed its prime by 2010, but my wife insisted the $5 extra was worth it. (Yes, we paid $65 for a $60 game to guarantee we had it on launch day. I still feel stupid for agreeing to that.)

 

However, when we got the game home, the disc would not play. This is straight out of a sealed box. This was not a game GameStop employees had played and re-sealed. (They do that.) This was factory sealed. Did some Googling, and found out there was a manufacturing defect. The disc was poorly pressed.

 

Went to return it to GameStop, and not only were they aware of the manufacturing defect, they were under strict orders to not accept returns. They were hoping, literally, that music gamers were so stupid that we would simply buy a second copy at the full $60 price.

 

So we went next door and returned it to Walmart. They gave us a little grief for not having a receipt, but when we explained that the disc was defective and that we just wanted the same exact thing, they happily agreed. (For some reason they got it in their heads that we wanted a refund, which they will not usually do without a receipt. But an even exchange for the same product, they absolutely will.)

 

Now we are happy buying games and electronics from Walmart. They may be a big evil box store, but they dealt fairly with us when we were a little less than fair. (I don't feel bad at all. I've worked in retail, and I know that they will send the defective copy right back to the manufacturer and get it replaced... the manufacturer eats the cost on that, not the retailer.)

 

Getting back to the OP, this reminds me of an old Internet legend about Best Buy and a brick and wood that was supposed to be a monitor (when they weighed a ton). Customer buys monitor. Takes it home, it's been replaced by bricks and wood to get the weight right. Customer takes it back. Best Buy accuses customer of swapping the monitor for the junk and lying about it. Customer accuses Best Buy of the reverse. Stalemate. Not to mention the eBay/PayPal/Laptop scam that's been going on for years. (Buy a laptop on eBay. Pay with PayPal. Receive laptop. Pawn laptop or otherwise get rid of laptop ASAP (optional). Accuse seller of not shipping laptop, and taking money and running. File dispute with PayPal. Get money back. Keep or sell laptop. Not sure if PayPal ever fixed that, but a lot of people made good money on that, and a lot of people got taken for a lot of money... probably money they could not afford to lose.

 

Commerce really sucks sometimes.

[Jazmac]

On 11/14/2016 at 11:10 PM, dragontology said:

...

Getting back to the OP, this reminds me of an old Internet legend about Best Buy and a brick and wood that was supposed to be a monitor (when they weighed a ton). Customer buys monitor. Takes it home, it's been replaced by bricks and wood to get the weight right. Customer takes it back. Best Buy accuses customer of swapping the monitor for the junk and lying about it. Customer accuses Best Buy of the reverse. Stalemate. Not to mention the eBay/PayPal/Laptop scam that's been going on for years. (Buy a laptop on eBay. Pay with PayPal. Receive laptop. Pawn laptop or otherwise get rid of laptop ASAP (optional). Accuse seller of not shipping laptop, and taking money and running. File dispute with PayPal. Get money back. Keep or sell laptop. Not sure if PayPal ever fixed that, but a lot of people made good money on that, and a lot of people got taken for a lot of money... probably money they could not afford to lose.

 

Commerce really sucks sometimes.

I was worried to say the least.  Timing was the key too because if this had been well into the Christmas holidays, I might be out 70 bucks today.