Scammed at Hard-Off

Its been such a long time since I posted anything... sorry about that. I have quite a bit to post these days, but I thought I'd start with a rant.

Russell and I have tried and tried to find decent second hand stores in Japan. It has not been easy. There are a large quantity of small shops that usually have decent large appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, etc) but its harder to find furniture and clothing. Finding it all in one place seems especially rare.

Now, Russell and I are cheap - very cheap. For our daily lives, we don't need much, and after 4+ years in Japan, we pretty much have everything we need - so our reasons for searching out a second hand shop had faded. A few months ago, however, we discovered that we were going to be having a baby. Hooray! This, however, meant we would need a few things we had not previously needed. While we have had family and friends very kindly asking to buy us things, our first inclination was to see what we could dig up for cheap in this neck of the woods.

A friend of ours tipped us off about Hard-Off. While the name strikes me as vaguely indecent, it goes along with Book-Off and Home-Off - a set of large scale second hand shops. Book-Off is everywhere, but it was the first we had heard of the others. Last week, Russell went with his friend and explored. He came back with promising tales of barely used baby supplies - strollers, bouncers, pack-and-plays, clothing... all super cheap. It sounded worth a closer look.

Today we had some free time, so we decided to take our wish list and see if there was anything we could do better buying ourselves. We started off at Home-Off on the second floor. Sure enough, plastic baby baths were a dollar, a wide variety of strollers were all under $100 - some were quite fancy at that - bouncers were $10 (this was something we had basically decided against since we wouldn't be using it long enough to validate the price). We were pretty pleased overall, though we decided to wait on making purchases until closer to the due date.

Then we went upstairs to Hard-Off. I think the name must be short for "Hardware-Off" - there were a lot of computers and electronics. We were browsing the kitchen appliances and we saw submersion (stick) blenders. Russell had just been wishing he had one after spotting a video on making home-made mayonnaise with one. There were three brands - a cheap T-Fal blender, another brand we didn't know for $40 (which turned out to be the new retail price on Amazon) and a Cuisinart submersion blender for $40. We checked the Cuisinart on Amazon, and it seemed like a steal, so we decided to get it.

Now, in the US, we would automatically have asked to plug it in and make sure it worked, but we have clearly become too trusting after so long in Japan. We bought the blender and headed home. Once there, Russell found the video he had seen before, watched it again, made sure we had all the ingredients and then opened the box. I think he said something like, "How is this a used Cuisinart?" I glanced over and thought he was referring to the fact that it looked brand-new. It was still in plastic with the direction book and everything. Then Russell pointed out the brand - "Twinbird". We looked it up. A cheap knock-off brand that sells new for about $20. We had been scammed.

We're going back tomorrow to call them on it and get our money back. To be honest, even if we had looked in the box, we may not have noticed the switch until we got home. Good thing Russell noticed before he opened any of the plastic. Sucks that the shop is so far away - easily an hour trip each way.

Grr. We definitely had better things to do with our Sunday.

Update: I waited until Thursday to take back the mixer. Hard-off didn't give me any trouble about it. They just asked if there was something wrong with it - I showed them that the brand was switched and they immediately gave me my money back. So relieved. Russell thinks the party responsible for the scam was likely the person who brought the mixer in. Anyone who looked inside the box would have thought it was the same mixer - brand new. So maybe Hard-Off is still okay... we'll just pay closer attention to to what we buy in the future.