Future Shop in legal breach of contract with Product Service Plan

Some background Info: (Issue follows below)

Future Shop Product Service Plan (PSP) details:

Tag #: 065787779

Reference #: C48690925

Local Future Shop Store (where unit was initially left for repair & where replacement should be made available):

Silver City Centre

1525 City Park Drive

Gloucester, Ontario

K1J 1H3

(613) 747-7636

The Issue:

We have a defective Yamaha Home Theatre Sound System (Model # DVXS150B), which was purchased roughly a year and a half ago from Future Shop. We are getting absolutely nowhere with them, despite having paid for an extended warranty which guarantees a replacement unit after 60 days of reporting the repair incident. We are now at Day 67 and Future Shop is still stalling. We opened the repair incident on June 23, 2006.

The repair in question actually involved 3 separate components on the unit: the DVD player had problems reading & finally would not read at all, the DVD player door would not close, and one of the auxiliary sound inputs would not work properly.

Future Shop has never once contacted us to advise us of the status of the repair. We have had to contact them. We tried contacting the local store, but after three separate tries with no answer, we gave up. At one point, we tried e-mailing the Technical group. But this only resulted in a canned response directing us to call the 1-800. During the 60-day wait period, each time we called the Future Shop technical group (1-800-663-2275), we were told that they needed to put us on hold so as to check with the repair group. After usually a 3 - 4 minute wait, invariably the agent would come back on the line to inform us that there is still no news and, as far as they know, the part (never specified which part) is still on backorder. Since the 60 days have expired, we have been told that another group needs to process the exchange with the local Ottawa store. First we were told that this would take up to 48 hours. Then we were told that our repair incident had not been transferred to the new group. Then we were informed that it would take up to 72 hours. (We were also advised that we cannot contact the new group directly; they would contact us.) We are now a week later with no way of knowing when the exchange will take place. The PSP is a legal contract, which means that Future Shop is now in a legal breach of contract. We now have very few options, as Future Shop refuses to communicate anything to us. Certainly one option is taking Future Shop to small claims court. We are seriously considering this option right now.

We are now of the opinion that once a company has your money, the consumer counts for nothing, whether it's a warranty or an extended warranty. We also believe that if enough pressure is placed on companies by consumers, that they will stop running as fast as possible from their legal responsibilities once they have the consumers' money. If enough of these abuses are made public, these companies will not have the upper hand any more.

Len Grady / Paul Wong