Now if you haven’t heard my last sorry tale with Newegg, let me tell you, they Jolly Roggered up time and again on what should have been a simple RMA, turning it into months of turmoil because for some reason their staff was completely incapable of processing a simple refund. (After Newegg refused to repair/replace my printer.) You can read the whole story here: Newegg Has Cracked And I’m Hard Boiled With Egg All Over My Face!

But after some time, and an offer from their customer service for $100 my next order, I finally decided to give them one more shot. Maybe I’d just had some extraordinary run of bad luck. Maybe. I’m a generous guy. And while I wasn’t going to go out of my way just to pick a hundred bucks of placation, I found myself in the need to order parts to build my hun a new computer, since hers is a Pentium 4 Willamette on it’s last legs. So I can give Newegg one more chance as I order her parts, and in the process nab myself a free Seagate (I always go with Seagate for their 5 year warranty) 250GB external hard drive to perform the PC backups that I really should be doing but never got around to getting an external hard drive to do them on.

Now, I have to say that Dianne V. Segue the Senior Customer Service Representative that tried to make up for Newegg’s gross incompetence was at least nice enough to talk to. And ordering everything seemed to go okay. She even not only applied the $100 discount I was promised, but also upgraded my shipping to priority and waived all shipping costs. That was nice of her, since the combined shipping on all of the parts came out to about $35 with standard UPS and it was a budget build because right now money is kind of tight, so every little bit helps. And I felt safer with priority shipping because I figure A) UPS will treat the parts better and B) the less time I have to wait, the less time I have to worry about her old computer going up in smoke before I can assemble the new one.

Now … having grossly screwed up before … you’d think Newegg would be on their best behavior this time. You’d think that everything would be hand-held micro-managed to perfection so that they don’t lose a customer … a customer not afraid to leave bad reviews on Reseller Ratings as well as write blogs about it all.

You’d think.

But no. Maybe Newegg has just grown too big for its britches. Maybe they just aren’t the finely tuned machine they once were. But sure enough, they screwed this one up too. I got the tracking order email that verified (by shipping date, but by nothing else) that my order was on the express route to my home. But also every bit of confirmation I got from Newegg still had the full retail price and shipping cost on it. Had they forgotten to discount me even after Dianne promised on the phone that it was done? Yes. They had.

A kind enough (all considered) email the morning after placing my order (since that’s when I’d finally gotten any confirmation emails) confirmed it. They’d boffed up. Again. On their last chance. And an abashed Dianne at least managed to issue a credit to my card for the difference that I’d been promised but hadn’t gotten. Thank the gods my card wasn’t close to max, and that at least, in the end, I did get the money back.

But that still doesn’t change the simple fact that once again, Newegg proved they can’t do anything right.

Now … I suppose I could turn the other cheek … and by that I mean my left butt cheek since I’ve already been slapped in the right mouth cheek, the left mouth cheek, and the right butt cheek. But thanks to the priority shipping I also got to be slapped in that last cheek.

Here is an example of Newegg’s idea of shipping (click on the images for larger versions):

You will notice that this box, shipped from Newegg, is rather lacking in tape to hold it together. The top of the box is barely even holding things in because no one bothered to run that tape down the side of the box … either side. So it’s bulging up like mad. Inside, the box was only half-filled with peanuts. I can only guess that the other half of those peanuts are in the UPS van or some such, since they were pouring out when I tipped the box as I brought it into the house. I’m not going to blame Newegg for the beat-up ragged condition of the box. That’s UPS’s fault I’m sure. But come on, at least tape the damn thing closed, will ya? It’s a miracle everything I ordered was still in it. Thank goodness nothing was small like a USB stick or an extra cable.

But that’s not all:

No, that isn’t a prop left over from some Nightmare on Newegg Street production. Freddy Krueger is not endorsing Logitech speakers. This was one of the products shipped from Newegg. Slashed more than a little bit. I have yet to even open that box. I can’t decide if I want to send it back on the grounds that they sliced and diced it, or if I’m sick of dealing with Newegg and am going to open it up and hope that there’s no internal damage so that I don’t have to RMA anything … again. But as you can clearly see by this example, Newegg no longer treats the products they peddle with kid gloves. Not only can they not tape boxes up right to ship products to customers in, but they seem to practice fencing against innocent Logitech speaker sets.

I am not impressed.

This is not the Newegg I used years ago.

Anyone who considers buying from Newegg … be warned. This is how they treated my order when they were on their best behavior to not lose me as a customer. They screwed up processing my discount and showed exactly what they mean by shipping and handling. Imagine how they treat customers that they aren’t afraid of losing.

Frankly, in my informed opinion, it’s official: Newegg sucks!