What was your last refund? Why did you get your last refund?

My refund was for a pack of tomatoes, boring! So I'll tell you a funny refund story I heard today. Friends, mostly a bit squiffy (driver aside) were trying to book a hotel at their destination on booking.com. There were rooms available in hotel A. "Check the reviews" said Ms Sober. "Nah, just book it!" said Ms Squiffy.

Booking made, they tried to contact the hotel. No answer. Reviews were AWFUL. "Rats behind the bar" type awful. Fast forward to arrival aaaand the hotel was closed. They moved on to hotel B, where they learned that hotel A was shut because the owner was in jail for repeated violation of food hygiene standards.

So they called booking.com for a refund. "We can't refund you until we've heard from the proprietor." "The proprietor is in PRISON." "Well we'd still like to give a chance to get in touch."

It took them weeks to get their money back. Moral of the story is always try to book directly with the hotel.

I just had a look and apparently it's back in business.

Review from this month: "Refused to stay, checked in 3 rooms & all checked out within 10mins of arrival, the disgusting place is a health hazard, taps not working, mould all over walls, the place needs closing down."

Owner: "Sorry this not true just looking for refunds."

-Be me

-buy Vape for Weed

-can't turn it on

-bruh.jpg

-send it back

-get new one

-can't turn it on

-bruh.jpg

-call customer service

-turns out im just retarded

One-size-fits-all batman cat mask was not so one-size-fits-all

For context - This cat's name is batman.

The crew 2 was $1 on steam. I use linux. The game has anticheat :(

Hozelock adjustable long spray lance, absolutely unfit for purpose, disposable garbage that broke after 3 months.

Last refund was a nightmare as it was a purchase from Amazon and outside their 30 day window, so initially they did not want to accept the return and directed me to the manufacturer. Hozelock just refused to engage, and directed me back to Amazon, endless loop. After going round this loop I then complaining to Amazon for a solid 10 minutes and they eventually agreed to pay for pick up of the item then refund when it was picked up.

Replaced it with a more expensive Dramm lance that every part is user replaceable with available spare parts, and much less plastic components.

Tax refund.

I didn't make enough money for the year to be taxed so I got all of it back.

A salad.

Was waiting for my flight out of LAX, so I grabbed a salad from the closest spot. $20, but whatever. Open it up and the ham smelled sour and all the iceberg lettuce was slimy.

I've never asked for a refund on a salad before, but for 20-fucking-dollars it should have been chopped up and prepped that very day. Yuck.

Last week I bought one of those giant vacuum insulated travel mugs (not a Stanley) from a discount variety store, along with a bunch of other things. After I paid, the cashier asked "do you want the receipt?", I normally say no, but this time for some reason I said yes. After I left the store, my kids needed to use the restroom, so while they went I sat down on the bench and absently looked through the receipt in my hand. I immediately noticed I got charged twice for the mug. The cashier must've double scanned it. I went back to the store, showed a manager my receipt, and they refunded me the difference.

That was technically my last refund, but the last product I actually returned was a set of tws (true-wireless-stereo) IEMs (fancy earbuds). They were a brand new model just released with great reviews, I bought them from Amazon, received them, and used them about a week. During that week I noticed every time they were in my ears, my ear canals got super irritated and my ears felt warm. And whenever I removed them the insides of my ears would be crazy itchy for hours afterwards. It got to a point after a week of use that my ear canals would swell and close up about 15 minutes after I put the earbuds in my ears. Didn't take a rocket surgeon to work out I was allergic to whatever material that earphone was made of. I still had the box and all the packaging, submitted a return to Amazon with the comment "my ears are allergic to those earphones" and they accepted it no problems, I got a full refund.

I hope to get a refund for my train ticket from last Thursday where the train was just cancelled.

Online request didn't work, so I have to go to the train station today and waste even more of my time.

Got diapers instead of a laptop from amazon.

A heavy triply steel kadai. Well technically it was a small fucking piece of plastic cup which I had to fight with Amazon to get a refund for that shit.

Ordered energy drinks on Amazon because I couldn't find the flavor at the grocery store anymore (Monster Nitro Cosmic Peach). The estimated arrival day got pushed back twice, and then the status changed to say that the item was late enough that I could claim a refund. I punched the tracking number into the UPS website and it said that a shipping label had been created, but the package was never actually handed over to UPS. My guess is that the seller ran out of stock and decided to do nothing about it and just wait for me to refund, but I guess it's also possible that someone at UPS swiped the package instead of scanning it into their system.

Either way, I did get a refund through Amazon support.

Kerbal Space Program 2.

Yeah it's looking really bleak over there...

I guess technically a refund? I returned tools I rented from O'Reilly to fix the timing chain on my truck. 250,000 miles and still runs like a champ, just ignore the noisey lifter haha

Bought a really nice TV a couple of years ago. About a month later, the manufacturer had a really big price drop. Microcenter has a really nice 60 or 90 day price guarantee so I popped into the local store and got about $800 back.

A pair of bicycle pedals. I regretted the purchase and returned them.

For the last case of a non-return, I got a refund on a wristband for my Fitbit, which had broken after very little use.

A game I only bought because someone else wanted to play that together on a private LAN party. That person then announced that they couldn't show up. And since I was terribly uninterested in playing that game on my own and only bought it for just that occasion, I refunded it after that news.

A controller, because im a dingus who didnt bother to make sure it had the right connector for my phone (it didnt)

Ordered a shelf, it was never handed off to the courier. Complained, got it redelivered but they sent it to the wrong address. They seem to have refunded me twice... haven't received any money back yet, but the shelf is due to arrive tomorrow so we'll see what happens

Train ticket!

I got it because I ended up being able to catch an earlier train, instead of the train I was expecting to catch and had bought a ticket for.

Bought an ECM for my vehicle. It didn't work, truck wouldn't prime the fuel pump or start. Returned it.

I got some jeans on Amazon, and I've came with some clear goop on them and the opened plastic wraping. It seemed like some kind of machine grease to the touch, but I have no idea. Anyway I got the refund without issue at least.

Many months ago I got a refund of around $250 on an online course because I changed my mind after my purchase. It was an amazing course but I didn't see myself using the knowledge in the future. Good thing I got a refund in time.

Online grocery order had a like-for-like product substitution, but the substitution was from a producer that uses a slightly different set of ingredients, one of which I have an intolerance of. Sending it back garnered a refund... and might have helped train an algorithm somewhere.

That is, if they have some kind of semi-random procedure to choose which customer gets a substitution, someone else who'd be more likely to accept it might get it instead, and I'll get the product I can eat.

Kerbal Space Program 2.

Tons of performance issues, bugs and I was generally not satisfied with the game even though I've put probably thousands of hours into the first game, which always ran perfectly on my computer. Believe me, it takes a lot for me to not enjoy a physics-based game and I really wanted to like it.

Asus Zephyrus g14 (2022).

It started to randomly shut down. I sent it to Asus for repair 2 times, but they always claimed that they could not find the issue. After realising that Asus was not gonna help me, I sent it back to the seller for a refund, which took 3 Months, a lot of emails and a phonecall to actually get.

In total between the repairs and refund I spent about 6 Months on this issue.

A Denon soundbar, that had a mysterious HDMI conflict that couldn't be fixed after multiple reparation attempts.

It's good that or most prominent webshop does reparations instead of automatic rebates, however I had to mail it back three times. And the second to last time they returned it saying it wasn't broken.

So when I mailed it up the last time they initially refused to refund, as 'it hadn't been repaired three times yet'.

Luckily they found it impossible to fix the problem, hence I got my refund. I'm happy with my JBL that was 50 Euros cheaper.

It was a UPS I bought on Amazon.

It arrived damaged in the box, almost certainly because the driver dropped it.

My experience with Amazon customer service was umm… fun.

1. click the request return button.

This item is not returnable.

2. call customer service

Them: “This item is not returnable”

Me “it arrived damaged”

Them: “We’ll send you an email, reply to it with evidence of damage”

3. reply to email sending pictures with close up of the damage

Please send the email from the same address associated with the Amazon account

4. resend reply from my other email

The pictures you sent are in the wrong format please resend as jpeg or pdf

5. convert the images and resend

The pictures you sent do not show the entire product

6. take new pictures from farther away

Please send pictures that clearly show the damage

😡

I bought a power supply for a second hand monitor and found that the 90-degree angle on the plug meant it couldn't actually go into the socket. I took it back to the shop and the owner offered to solder a straight plug onto the adaptor for me - but couldn't find one to use, so he gave me my money back.

Govets, they say they have products in stock but they will never ever ship.

They also want a driver's license picture and a selfie for a fucking server part

Last night, hotel sucked. Went to a better hotel. Not really a refund, but we weren’t charged for the rest of our reservation.

An office chair. A piece was wrong making the thing unassemblable. Got the money back and bought a more expensive one from a much better shop. Happy about that because the expesive chair is much better than what the cheap one would have been.

Elden Ring, not my type of game

A fan light kit for a ceiling fan. Had a customer who needed one fixed this weekend. Picked one up from the store and didn't use it, so back it went.

College payments. Received a $1500 grant payout three weeks into the semester, which left me with about $100 to claim.

Lindsay Olives Ripe Pitted Snack 4 pack. They changed the packaging, which is fine, but the olives taste worse and have strange texture. I already tried Pearls and they didn't pass muster from the get-go.

Sewing machine. It was cheap as I am just learning and didn't want to drop heavy change. I actually returned it and bought another one. Both had shit bobbin casings (I think that's what they're called). Literally said, "fuck it," returned it, and youtubed how to sew by hand. Much less frustrating.

eBay purchase. Seller claimed "a failure to update stock inventory in our warehouse"

GTA V on Steam, but not because of AntiCheat that makes the game unplayable on Linux. I just don't like it. It's not fun.

I've been fixing up an old motorcycle, and the weekend I was finally ready to try starting it I discovered an issue in the electrical system. I discovered this by blowing both of the fuses I had for it. I ordered new fuses from Amazon that would arrive Monday, but then decided Saturday morning that I didn't want to wait, so I replaced the existing fuse holder with a more modern one so I could get fuses at the auto parts store, and returned the older style fuses when they arrived

Steam. A zombie game I got didn't perform very well on my Deck.

Amazon told me my package had to be returned presumably for damage so I got a refund two days before the package arrived undamaged.

Shoes. I bought 2 pair of shoes from the same maker in the exact same size. One pair fit, the other both too small (in length) and too big (in width and depth) so no size was gonna work.

I bought a collection of DOSBOX-wrapped TSR Gold Box AD&D games from Steam. After spending more time than I recalled it needing to generate a party and then even longer getting my bearings puttering around the civilized part of New Phlan, Pool of Radiance started crashing and truncating item strings (rendering them useless and un-removeable) and dropping like 50,000 gems from a random Kobold encounter.

It was unplayable without, I assume, tracking down sketchy third-party save-game editors. However, since it took me a couple of hours to get out into the first proper dungeon, they tried to say I was past my "reasonable" preview time, which I guess in reality is treated as a two-hour hard cutoff. I ran it through the system a couple of times and got auto-denied, but eventually got through to a chat agent who gave me my eleven dollars back as Steam credit. :-)

Amazon sends me open, broken, defective, and/or outright used items all the time these days. So I have a lot of returns, and if I get two in a row, I take a refund instead because their whole inventory of that item is probably too polluted to get a new one. If only there were any other ways to get some things, I'd quit buying from them, but with the lack of small specialty stores, even in cities, it's so hard to find so many things in physical stores anymore, and smaller online stores can't compete, especially for items that need to be tried a lot to find the right size or type.

Prepackaged antipasto gave me days of horrible indigestion

Mi Band (Fitness tracker/watch) that was supposed to be waterproof died in the water, refunded without issues.

Amazon sent a mouse mat that was the wrong box in the first place QcK Heavy instead of QcK, and even worse, inside was a dirty old mouse mat from a different brand entirely. It was annoying to post it back (internationally, they aren't in my country) but they refunded without issue at least.

Clip on sunglasses. I've bought from same online place for a couple of years now. I discovered they offered a blue tint mirrored finish style.

When they arrived they were tinted on the wrong side! I wonder how many pairs were made incorrectly. I would think many, many pairs.

I believe it was a steam game that didn't work through proton. Valve customer service is amazing! Happy with the trade-off where the flash sales ended to enable them to offer refunds.

I bought a pair of Birkenstock dupes on Amazon and they were at least 5 sizes too big. I ended up with a pair of Crocs that are styled like Birks and even look like leather. Crocs are my jam. I'll take the hate.

Total War: Warhammer

...because a friend suggested it, I gave it an honest try within the refund grace period, and it wasn't my kind of game.

PS5 controller. Stick drift.