Last September I bought an LG Rumor cell phone, and the dealer threw in a free car charger to go along with it. After I had used that charger for several months, it simply stopped working one day so I headed over to the local Wal-Mart to shop for a new one. In the “Electronics” department stood a display featuring a variety of chargers from a company called “Just Wireless”, and sure enough they had one to fit the LG Rumor.
I paid for the charger, then headed out to the car to check it out. The first time I plugged it into the phone everything seemed to work just fine. The plugs mated up and snapped together very easily, easier in fact than the charger that came with the phone had ever done. After the battery had fully charged, I disconnected the charger and stuck the phone in my pocket. All was well with the world – or so it seemed…
Later that evening I plugged the charger into the phone once again, and once again the connection was effortless and smooth. But there was a problem. The little red light on the charger that indicated that the battery was charging failed to come on as it had the time before. I unplugged the charger from the phone and tried to re-connect it, but the connectors wouldn’t mate up properly. I examined the charger’s connector and it appeared to be ok, but when I checked the connector on the phone I saw right away that it had been damaged.
Dejected, I returned home and tried connecting the “home” charger to the phone, but as expected it wouldn’t mate up either. The phone’s connector had been mangled so badly that it simply refused to work at all, with ANY charger.
Well, the next day I returned the charger to Wal-Mart and they cheerfully refunded the purchase price. Later that evening Cheria sent an email to Just Wireless’ customer service department explaining what had happened. They eventually responded, telling us to mail in the original purchase receipt for the charger and the charger itself (neither of which I had because I had already returned the charger to Wal-Mart) along with the damaged phone. The email promised that upon receipt of all those items they would be forwarded to the appropriate department for evaluation, possibly resulting in compensation for the damaged phone.
Now I wasn’t about to send my cell phone to a company that I had never heard of prior to that fateful day, and it wouldn’t have done any good anyway since I didn’t have the charger or the receipt to send along with it. I decided to just let it drop since there was nothing I could do about the situation anyway, but I’ll never buy another product from Just Wireless again.
I acknowledge the fact that I was partially at fault for returning the charger to Wal-Mart before filing the claim with Just Wireless, but the customer service information on the charger’s packaging didn’t say anything about having to send all those items in in order to file a claim. They just listed the customer service email and let it go at that. Life is full of “live and learn” opportunities, and I guess this was one of them.