I take it back.

Man. Did you read my previous post? Yeah? Well, I rescind my apology.

I still like the Wal*Mart up north by my parents' house. BUT... Read on.

Our friends at Wal*Mart had a deal going that if you purchased more than a certain amount, upon approval, you could get 0% financing for so many months. New Mr. Tia likes to do that. He opens a finance account, and pays it off before the certain months are up.

So we get the tv home. New Mr. Tia starts measuring and figuring and leveling to get the tv just right on the wall.

Did you know that when you buy a flat panel tv, you also have to spend almost another hundred dollars on the wall mount? And lo and behold, we bought the ONLY tv that required a ridiculous size wall mount. The holes on a standard flat panel are so many inches apart, but we bought the tv that requires a wall mount for holes that are many more inches apart. So we go back to Wal*Mart.

Ugh.

Of course when you have a return they have that nice person at the door that greets you and gives you a pink sticker to indicate that it is a return. We of course cannot go to electronics to return said wall mount, but we have to go to the conventional return line that was seriously stretched to the other entrance of the store. I waited in line while New Mr. Tia went to electronics to see if they even had the wall mount we needed. When he came back, I still hadn't moved in line. There was only one cashier at the returns desk. We saw a faint glimmer of hope when another cashier came to her aid only to help about two, maybe three people and then return to her post of doing nothing but swinging keys and looking official.

We finally get to the sweet little lady that was so beaten down by the overwhelming amount of returns. She asks if we would just like a credit back to the account in which we used to purchase the item. We say sure. I love that now when you return something you don't have to pull out your credit card, they have it on record.

We go back to electronics. They don't have it. So we leave and New Mr. Tia says he is going to Home Depot to look for one. Nothing. Lowe's. Nothing. I get on Target.com and that's right. Nothing.

So we decide to give up for the night and assemble the tv on the stand and set it on the new chest we got.

Then we turned on the tv.

And we see a tiny green dot smack dab in the middle of the screen.

Next morning New Mr. Tia calls the company and they say a pixel is out and it is not covered under warranty unless a certain percentage of pixels are out. So guess what we did?

Head back to Wal*Mart. I decided to get a pedicure. Yes, Wal*Mart has pedicure people. Again, another dumb idea. I still have a nice scab from where my cuticle was yanked from my toe.

New Mr. Tia returned the tv and asked if he could just exchange it for a different tv. They told him it would be better to just return the tv and go back to electronics to get the new tv and do seperate transactions. Again, they just credited the account back.

We decided on a different tv with the standard wall mount measurements and the cost of the tv was cheaper and the quality of the product was better.

I was walking around looking at the new gps systems and accessories when I hear New Mr. Tia's voice. He doesn't deal well with bad situatins and poor customer service.

Upon approaching the cash register the girl says his account is not valid. You know when you apply for a store charge account, they give you a receipt with your account information for you to use until your physical card comes in the mail? And you can use that receipt over and over and if it expires before you get your card in the mail, you can give them some information, they can pull it up?

Not at Wal*Mart.

Supposedly, your receipt is only valid for 24 hours and we were passed the 24 hour period. They could not pull up the account information and said we had to wait until the card came in the mail. EVEN MANAGEMENT told us that.

As New Mr. Tia's face got more and more red, I asked the lady, "you have a $... sale in front of you and you're telling us that we can't get it on the deal you are offering us and we have to wait? That is ridiculous. I have never heard of a store doing such a thing."

So now what happened? I applied for the financing so we could get the tv and everyone was happy.

But now, I'm back to boycotting Wal*Mart. Starting tomorrow. I have to get a few things today and don't have time to go back to Target. And Target doesn't carry the things I need.

In other topics...

Anyone watch the Grammys? Or is it Grammies? Anyway, How do you feel about them turning the music on during Kanye West's acceptance speech? And they wouldn't turn it off until he said that it would be in good taste to turn off the music when he started talking about his recently departed mother? How could they think he wasn't going to say something about her?