We want to love the Discovery Channel Store. The shows are great, and by implication the stuff they sell should be good clean fun for kids. Unfortunately, much of it seems to fall apart at the slightest touch.
Last year my kid got a remote controlled airplane for Christmas from Discovery. It didn’t work. We took it back to the store and exchanged it for another which… also didn’t work. By this I mean that the mechanisms that communicate from a controller to the plane to its moving parts had some kind of disconnect. Finally, on the third try we got a plane that DID work and we succeeded in crashing it ourselves, end of RC airplane trauma.
Just now we’ve ordered again, thanks to a gift certificate. Specifically, RC Anthropods! Three bugs which scutter along as controlled by a twig with a battery hidden inside. But one of the bugs was missing its charger connector out of the box, and a second lost its connector (the thing that powers its internal battery, so it will move) as well as its scuttering wheels within 24 hours. It was at this point I contacted Discovery Online (the stores are all now closed) and asked for a refund.
As with the store experience last year, the reply was prompt and extremely polite: they’ve credited me with the full amount of the purchase and I don’t even have to return the defective toy. Of course, if they did this on every toy that was defective they might quickly shutter their online store too. Could it be their profit model to flood the market with evidently poor quality, but very cheap, product and hope that inertia keeps customers from asking for their money back?
The flaw with this is the difficulty of getting repeat business, which may be why the brick-and-mortar locations shut down (including one which had just opened in a pricey location at SF’s new Westfield Center). Right now the web store is heavily promoting—the RC Anthropods were yesterday’s special. Let’s see what happens after Christmas.. As my solicitious email from the customer service department concluded,
Thank you for shopping with us and LET’S ALL DISCOVER!