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| - When rating a Wal-Mart, you have to put things in perspective. Is anyone in their right mind going to give 4 stars (Yay! I'm a fan.)? Yes, Wal-Mart does have its fans, but they are not in their right mind.
I used to hate Wal-Mart, but lately I don't hate it as much. Contrary to popular perception, Wal-Mart does have some helpful employees. Maybe they are trying harder now that steady jobs are becoming scarce.
People complain that Wal-Mart employees are not friendly or helpful. They should try Costco. For your $50 membership you get the privilege of having surly employees treat you like shit. Supposedly Costco employees are the elite of retail. I guess it's gone to their head.
The guy in electronics wasn't so helpful. When I asked about converters, he said "for what?" I think he knew. He was just being a smartass. A customer-friendly employee would have said "The DTV converters are over there."
I assumed a DTV converter is a simple device; they're probably all about the same. Just get a cheapie from Wal-Mart.
I bought the RCA unit for $10 with the coupon. It was crap. Only worth about ten bucks in any case. When I took it back, I found out that YOU CAN'T GET ANOTHER coupon. Yes, if you aren't happy with the unit, you are SOL as far as the coupon goes.
I took exception to this with the attendant at the returns desk, but she was very polite and patient with her explanation that it's government policy, not Wal-Mart's fault. It dawned on me that she has a tough job and she does it pretty well. Better than I could certainly. I'm sure Wal-Mart has no customer service training, so she was operating purely on common sense and native people skills.
I could have exchanged the RCA for another product, but at this point I realized that Wal-Mart offers a lot of garbage you can't count on (for example my Motorola cell phone). Yes, it's good to shop there only for certain categories.
Luckily, a friend had an extra coupon. It took it to Radio Shack and bought a Digital Stream unit for $15. The Radio Shack product was far far better than Wal-Mart's worthless piece of crap.
If you don't have your government coupon by now you may miss the conversion to digital if you want $40 off. It's not a worry for the 99% of the population who have cable or satellite. I'm one of the schmucks who doesn't have a subscription.
Radio Shack won't even let you EXCHANGE your unit without paying an extra $7 for an extended warranty at the time of purchase. At this point I was so fed up with the whole DTV clusterfuck that I just took my chances (didn't pay the $7). I wasn't a fan of Radio Shack before this. Now I'm even less likely to ever buy anything from them.
The conversion to digital is a bonanza for the Spanish speaking. There are several new digital channels for them. There are two extra PBS channels and a sports channel that shows nothing but endless replays winter sports, Paralympics, triathalons, etc. One of the new PBS channels is all about cooking, sewing, etc. The Digital Stream remote lets you omit a channel from the surfing lineup, which I did for the kitchen/crafty channel, among others.
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