Beware Buy Today Ship Today program

Beware Buy Today Ship Today program-it falsely implies speedy delivery!

After one laptop (Acer) failed my Thinkpad started having problems; After agonizing over what IBM's sale of Thinkpad line meant I decided to go with Lenovo anyway; Since my need was very near future I picked a model from Think Express Buy Today, Ship Today program on Wednesday Oct 19th. The T42 in cart had CALL as status, so I selected link to have them call me while my shopping cart held the T42; the popup promised someone would call in 5 minutes; 80 minutes later I clicked on the link again and this time got a reply, and was told there were plenty of the model I ordered in Stock, could see no reason to expect delay; my call was transferred to someone who could take order as 3pm ET cutoff for "ship today" was approaching; order finished about 2:20ET with representative, who understood my situation and suggested two-day shipping because of my immediate need, getting off phone to complete paperwork for timely shipment; TWO DAYS later thinkpad still not shipped; two days of phone calls were not returned; my third, this time angry call was fielded after "everyone had gone for the day" so a supervisor called me Monday Oct 24 and apologized for delay; It is now NINE days after my order and UPS says order being HELD BY BROKER for reasons beyond UPS's control.

It undoubtedly is beyond UPS's control, but certainly not beyond Lenovo's. They need to discontinue the Buy Today Ship Today program until they can maintain sufficient supply in the US (the people I dealt with were in US, web page&phone number only for US) for this to be a meaningful promise! If you need a thinkpad in less than two weeks I suggest trying CDW.

Aside on Acer failure: I suspect there was a never-recalled badly designed disk-controller chip placed in many systems; I know of many Acer travelmate 220s with this flaw and at least one desktop; the problem shows up as program exception; the hard disk passes all read tests but writes to wrong sectors sometimes; I had a similar problem with Thinkpad X21 made about same time, so like the current digital camera chip problem affecting many manufacturers my guess is the same thing happened here, but no manufacturer wanted to bite the bullet and replace boards that might not fail until service contract ended.

 

My T43 is sitting with customs for the last 10 days. Apparently this is due to FDA checking shipmets for bird flu!

 

I did: google Lenovo customs delay
and the results were very discouraging. The two links below are typical, and it appears from those customer comments that Lenovo is doing a spectacularly bad job filling out customs forms. If the laptops are held to check for bird flu then someone at Lenovo probably indicated what they shipped was alive (like a duck or chicken, not working laptop). Even worse the CNET review says Lenovo starts warranty clock running when system packed, making no allowances for huge shipping delays. Consider complaining to your state attorney general or other consumer protection agency for misrepresentation. The posts seem to indicate that UPS keeps ending up with wrong docs, but Lenovo keeps telling customers that it is not true; I have to believe UPS has a lot more experience with customs than Lenovo, and it seems to have been going on for months so they are not even learning from their mistakes.

http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=25839&whichpage=49

http://reviews.cnet.com/ThinkPad_X4...essageSiteID=7&messageID=1396639&cval=1396639