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

For context - This cat’s name is batman.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Tax refund.

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

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.