Hey everybody, how's it going? Hope you're having a lovely day. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, my koi fish pond no longer has algae in it, and I didn't have to use a single chemical, and Thermaltake is screwing over their customers, and we're going to make sure they never get a sale again. Welcome to How You're Getting F'd, I'm your host, Lewis Rossman.
On this channel, I've talked a lot about right to repair. Right to repair is the idea that you should be able to fix what you own. As Kyle Weins at iFixit says, if you can't fix it, you don't own it. We don't talk about when designs get more difficult over time. We don't complain about things like inverter boards that you used to be able to plug in with your hand, turning into micro BGA chips.
What we talk about here are when companies place intentional barriers to you being able to fix your own devices, forcing you to purchase a new one because you're not able to fix what you own. And this is something that I've discussed with electronics, with tractors, with medical equipment. I never in a million years thought I would have to discuss this with a chair.
Not just a chair, a $600 chair. Now, if any of you have been watching my channel for any length of time, I'm just going to take a wild guess that my core demographic are people sitting in chairs that cost anywhere from free to 50 bucks. You don't buy gaming chairs for three or five thousand dollars.
Not only are these very expensive chairs, they're also horribly uncomfortable. For a very short period of time in September of last year, you may have seen that I had a DX racer chair. I did not pay for that.
I would never in a million years pay for such a piece of shit. I got that thing for free. I thought maybe there's a 1% chance that when they asked me to review that chair, it wouldn't suck. And it did suck. I told everybody that it sucked in the last video that I did with that chair.
It was horrible. It was very uncomfortable. I'm not even, I put that shit outside. I'm not even going to let Clinton the cat sit on that thing because I would not torture my cat by having him sit on such a piece of shit chair. That's my experience at gaming chairs.
But they do make these gaming chairs that are damn near $600. This is a Herman Miller Aeron chair that I'm sitting in right now. This is one of the most top-of-the-line chairs that you will ever buy.
It is the best of the best, the creme de la creme of chairs. And this thing is $553. I got mine with one or two scuffs on it from Madison Seating on eBay for $425 at the time.
What we're talking about here, and we're talking about an unfixable chair, is a chair that is being sold right now for $500. This thing used to be sold for approximately $600, as you can see over here. And they're telling the customer that you're not able to fix it.
Not only that, but they're going to tell the customer this with a fucking attitude. So let's go over this. Hi, Thermaltake. I need to purchase a pair of replacement arms for my Thermaltake Cyberchair E500. as my arms were misplaced while I was moving.
Please let me know how I can order a replacement pair. Do keep in mind, he's not asking for free arms. He's not asking for a discount.
He's not complaining on the warranty. He takes accountability and responsibility. He's not trying to pretend that they broke a little bit or became damaged as a result of a defect. He wants to pay for them. Hello, we do not have parts purchasing available.
Sorry for the inconvenience. Notice it's not I'm sorry. Michael Carvin told me this 15 years ago, and he told me that you should notice this when people do this.
And unfortunately, I didn't, which is why I wind up dating the wrong people over and over and over again. Michael Carvin was one of the coolest and most respect worthy people I've ever met in my life. From the age of 17 to today, I wish I was like 10% the man Michael Carvin is.
I'm never going to forget this one time. This one person showed up late to his class because he had basic rules for his class and how he ran his business. He held himself.
to a standard. And he did something like this kid's, he was late, and he mentions that the kid's late. He's like, sorry, or something like that. He's like, here, I'll pay you extra. I forget what it was.
It was something insulting, like five or ten bucks. So he takes the kid's money, and he's like, you're going to pay me ten dollars extra? And then he did see that he put his cigar through, and he's like, I don't give a fuck about your money. And the kid just ran away thinking, what the fuck just happened?
But that's exactly what should happen when somebody says, sorry. Who's sorry? My neighbor? God?
You? Me? He said that when somebody says sorry, there's no accountability and no responsibility. It's actually a passive-aggressive way of saying I should not even have to apologize for this. The fact that you even want me to acknowledge that I've done something hurtful or wrong in and of itself is offensive to me because I should be allowed to screw with you as much as humanly possible and then gaslight you about it later.
When somebody says sorry, that's not an apology. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I did this.
I'm sorry that I broke this and I have to buy you a new one. I'm sorry I wasn't able to fix it. That's an apology. When somebody's like, yeah, I'm disappointed that you broke my thing.
Sorry. That's not an apology. And when people do that, cut them the fuck out of your life.
That being said, let's go back to this. We do not have parts purchasing available. Sorry for the inconvenience. Customer. What?
I paid $600 for this chair. You are still selling it on your website. Are you really telling me that there is no way to get replacement parts? Their response, after he says, please escalate this as I plan on doing a write-up covering this issue, this is going to seriously affect my trust in your brand and purchasing of any Thermaltake products in the future, which again, is a completely legitimate and justified response.
Thermaltake, we cannot pull parts from a brand new unit in order to sell. That would make the entire unit a loss. Is he fucking asking you to do that? Is he asking you to go into somebody else's chair, rip that apart, and then throw away the rest of the chair? No, he's not.
See, what you did over there is you're trying to play that bullshit game that the people I date do, where they do this thing where they kind of make you seem unreasonable by... Responding to the thing that you didn't say. Why are you assuming that he wants you to take the parts off of a complete chair?
Why are you assuming that he wants you to create a complete loss for your company? What he's asking is for the parts to be able to fix his own chair. And if you don't have parts available for something like this, what kind of fucking company are you?
Additionally, even if we could, we do not have the means to charge you for parts. This is the big most gaslighting shit in the world. If you take a look over here, At this website, Thermaltake's website, you take a look, it's $500 for the chair.
I can add the thing to cart. Now watch this. They have something called an e-commerce website.
When you have an e-commerce website, in order to take people's money, you have this thing called merchant services, which is how you accept credit cards. So as you can see over here, I have store.rossmangroup.com. You can buy a chip. And if I go into my configuration, what you'll see over here is that there's something called a merchant services API.
And what this does is it connects my online e-commerce store. to my merchant services so that i could take your money i input my login id my transaction id my secret and then i can take your money You know how to take people's fucking money. You don't want to help this customer. You don't want to help them.
You have a way to take their money. You have an e-commerce website, and you have merchant services. Are you telling me that every single fucking person that checks out on this website does not have their credit card charged?
It says 500, I add to card, I check out, and I don't get charged? How fucking stupid do you think your customers are? Because the ball's on these people. The reason this frustrates me is it's not even as a customer, as a business owner this pisses me off. Because I know how easy it is to go onto a fucking website like this.
Even a piece of shit like Magento, this duct tape Sanford and Son pile of garbage PHP based product that has been just like, you know, junk on top of junk for the past 15 years that I've used it. You go to the website, you go to this page, and you click a button called add product. And then you add a product.
And then you can charge a customer for it. The idea that you cannot take a customer's money is a complete, ludicrous, gaslighting lie. You have the ability to. You don't want to.
You don't want to escalate it. Your company doesn't want to help a customer. You don't want to make it easier for this person to be able to fix what they own. You don't give a fuck about the customer.
But rather than be honest, rather than be the whole bitch and say, I don't care about you, fuck off, you give them this bullshit, gaslighting lie. Fuck you. Regardless of your lost parts, we are not obligated to sell additional parts, as no manufacturer is obligated to. I will not be escalating this, as it will just be reiterated, this is not a policy we can make an exception to.
That's the fuck you cherry on top. Not only do we not have a means to do that, which is a bullshit lie, but even if we did have a means to do it, South Park Cable Company CEO. This is as close as you are going to get to the cable company CEO in South Park rubbing his titties and telling you to go fuck yourself.
And it's coming from a company that somehow has managed to exist as long as I've been building PCs. Well, I built my first computer back in 2004, 2005. This company existed. And the irony is, I remember on the DFI Street forums back in the day, DFI Street, I remember back in the day when they were actually, you know, a cool, hardcore, overclocking motherboard brand, people hated Dermaltake even then.
How the fuck did they make it this far? Wait, so you are telling me that you have no way of providing replacement parts for a $600 chair, and somehow this is my problem. I'm sorry, but this does need to be escalated.
I will be making sure to document this, as well as all additional communications on Reddit, as well as Gamers Nexus. What, am I fucking chopped liver? Really? If something is defective, we will do what is needed to help the situation.
This is different from selling parts, which again, we are in no way obligated to do. Your chair is not defective. You lost the parts.
This motherfucker put it in all caps! It's his fault that you are such a fucking failure of a business that not only do you have to lie about not being able to charge somebody on your fucking e-commerce website as if you have the only website on the internet that can selectively take people's money, but you are going to blame the customer for the fact that you are so fucking shitty that you cannot have parts available. Look at this.
Every fucking chair you can buy at that price. I can buy wheels for an Aeron chair. I can buy... The arm pads, the bolts, the replacement hardware, an Aeron chair arm mechanism, something for when this thing gets loose over here, which it has on mine, the Aeron chair actuator assembly.
You have numerous websites. You go anywhere you want, and this thing costs less than yours. And you can't manage to make parts available to a chair that is $600 fucking dollars. And not only are they saying that, he's putting it in all caps as if it's the customer's problem that you're a fucking failure, a joke. of a company.
With all due respect, that is your issue. With all due respect, gargle my fucking balls. Once again, this will not be escalated. The part sales policy is not something we can get around. Cool.
So glad I chose to buy this over a secret laps chair who carry replacement parts. I promise I'm going to let everybody know exactly what Thermaltake thinks qualifies as customer service. Have a nice day. Now, one of the things that I've discussed in one of my last videos is that there's a thing that is incredibly immoral, and I really try to go over this thing on this channel. There's a lot of...
ethics, you know, corporate morals, corporate ethics, not just that, but personal ethics and business ethics, because I want to ensure that everybody who watches this channel is a moral and ethical person. And if you are not a moral or ethical person, you should unsubscribe. My mother had several less than ethical ways of doing business. And I scolded her for this until the day that she died. She did this thing to Toys R Us.
Many people have this misconception that Toys R Us was bankrupted by Mitt Romney or Bain Capital. And they are wrong. They were bankrupted by... A 4'11 woman from San Benedetto that immigrated to the United States.
What she used to do is, there was a lot of stuff at Toys R Us that would break very easily. Toys R Us back in the day was kind of like what Amazon.com is now, with all this knockoff garbage showing up that would work for a month or two and then die. And they had a very, very short return period, sometimes as low as 30 or 60 days on certain products.
So if a product only lasted for 90 days and there was clearly no abuse of the product, she used to have something that she called a lifetime warranty, which was she would go to the Toys R Us, she would buy another one of the same product, and then she would take the malfunctioning product, put it in the box, and return it to get around the 30-or 60-day bullshit return policy where the product would die at 90 days, and the Toys R Us manager would do the cable company CEO South Park shit. And then she'd return it. And she would rely on this, that perhaps the serial number on the box was different than the serial number on the product, but when the employee at Toys R Us is getting $3 or $3.50 an hour, they just don't care enough to check.
Very wrong. Highly... Unethical, shitty, garbage thing to do. And I made sure whether I was three years old or 20 years old to let her know how little I thought of her every time she did that.
That's immoral and that's wrong because it hurts the manufacturer. It can also hurt, particularly because the retailer is going to say, if we have a high return rate on this product, we're not going to sell it anymore. It also may, in some cases, hurt the retailer because it wastes their time. If anybody does this, you must unsubscribe immediately.
Never talk to me again. Never email me again. You are banned from using Rossman Repair Group for any of your data recovery or repairs because I will not associate with these people.
But hypothetically speaking, let's say we had a website that was known for screwing over customers, that was known for selling dangerous products, like I mentioned in my last video. And, you know, hypothetically speaking, let's say that they sold this chair from time to time and you could occasionally get this chair in stock. What would be really wrong is if you bought this chair and then you took the arms out of it and you returned it and said that it came missing. If anybody were to ever do something like that, I would personally come to your house and scold you and accost you and let you know just what a piece of shit you were. This kind of reminds me, if somebody were to do something like that, it would be very interesting.
Because this guy, keep in mind, he's literally trying to pay the company. He's taking accountability and responsibility for losing the arms and he wants to pay for them. And this piece of human fucking debris that works there said, you lost the parts.
As if, like, this man is trying to take accountability for his mistake, and he's trying to pay, and he wants to pay you with a markup. This kind of reminds me of this Bill Burskid about going to the grocery store and wanting to pay for something. If somebody were to do this horribly immoral thing, which they never should, I'll play the Bill Burskid over here.
This is beautiful. I want to steal now. I just don't have the nerve. I just want to fill up a whole grocery cart full of food, right?
Just walk up to one of those automated machines. You count five Mississippi, eh, guess they don't want to get paid. They just start walking out. Then when security shows up, you just play dumb. Like, what?
I didn't know. I didn't know. Sir, you have to bring that back. No, I don't!
What, are you gonna cut my hours? I don't work here! I did my job!
I picked out what I wanted, I brought it up, I was gonna pay you, but you weren't there, so I fucking left! No! What did you think I was going to do, arrest myself?
Not only did they outsource this chair most likely to the biggest piece of shit cheap-ass company to make it That would not supply them with replacement parts, but they are they have an attitude about it like they're gonna gaslight you They're gonna lie to you about not having a website that has the ability to take your money They're gonna make fun of you. You lost the parts. Yeah, no shit She. That's exactly what I fucking told you now Let me buy a replacement. Why should you buy this piece of garbage?
when you could buy a chair that's better in every possible way. These chairs are more durable. These chairs are more comfortable. And the people that run Herman Miller, if you have a problem with their chair, they're going to help you. They have networks of people that sell parts for their chairs.
They will help you if you have a problem. They're not going to treat you like this. And if you find a deal online, you can buy these chairs, these beautiful, top-of-the-line, amazing chairs, for less money than a Thermaltake gaming chair. And to be clear, this is how they're treating you on a chair.
There's no electronics in this. Would you trust something from this company? That you're plugging into your solid-state drives?
That you're plugging into your $2,000 graphics card? That you're plugging into your $500 motherboard? I wouldn't trust these people to manufacture a fucking bowl for my cat's cat food. Much less with anything electrical or electronic.
They think you're a piece of shit. They think you're a joke. And they talk to you like you're a joke.
They talk down to you... Like the people that I choose to be in relationships with. Why tolerate it? You shouldn't tolerate it.
You shouldn't tolerate it. That's it for today. And as always, I hope you learned something. I'll see you in the next video.
Bye now.