Putting Apple Headphones Through The Wash: Another Great Customer Experience

You want to know what happens when you accidentally leave your iPhone headphones in your pants pocket and wash them? Well, for about a week they still work just fine. Then after about a week you start noticing some static in the left headphone. Now this was totally my fault. I'm sure iPhone headphones aren't meant to go through the the whole wash/dry cycle.

So when I decided to go to the SF Apple (AAPL) store to see about getting them replaced I wasn't the most optimistic.

I stepped into the store and immediately I was greeted by an Apple employee right at the door. The store was packed, but there had to be at least 50 employees in green shirts running around helping people. This is in TOTAL contrast to those blue shirt guys at Best Buy (BBY), or even worse, those red shirted guys at CompUSA where you can't find someone to help you if your life depends on it.

Anyway, so even though the store was packed, there was a guy available to help me right there at the door. So I started to explain my headphones problem, with my old headphones in hand, and before I could get 20 seconds into it he stops me politely and says, "hold on, let me see what I can do, I'll be right back."

With that he's gone for about 2 minutes and comes back with a brand new set of headphones and hands them to me. No questions asked. No receipts. No cost to me (I was totally prepared to have to buy a new pair). Just free. Just like that.

Now, I blogged about Apple giving me back $100 earlier today. Which is very cool. But let me tell you. That $100 can't even touch how good it makes me feel about having an experience like this today at the Apple store.

Want to know why Apple has such diehard Appleheaded fanboys? Well there you go. My new headphones sounded fantastic on BART on the way home by the way. Thanks Apple and I promise not to wash/dry this new pair.

Comments

[Socrates'Dog]

Apple really is amazing in this way. My wireless mouse wasn't working, handed me a new one. But here's the real kicker: my G5 was one year old; it froze up for some reason, so I took it in. While my data was fine, they said they (regretted that) they couldn't fix it. What did they do? (Out of four macs I've owned since the early 90s, this was the only one that ever "broke down.") They replaced it, not with a refurbed G4, but with a brand new $2400 Quad-Four Intel Mac, onto which they transferred my data! Didn't charge me a penny! There is simply no company out there like Apple.

[mpkirby]

In addition, if you go to the gym, and take a shower, after drying your hair, don't put your earbuds back in your ears until you dry them out.

The same thing will happen.