A Story of Financial Independence


Recently, I bought a 6-pack of EcoSmart lightbulbs on Amazon. When the new lightbulbs arrived, I stashed them away in storage for the future day that I would need them. Two months later, one of my old lightbulbs burned out and so I installed one of the new EcoSmart bulbs to replace it. Unfortunately, that is when I discovered that the new EcoSmart lightbulb had an issue with flickering intermittently.

The flickering did not happen constantly, but several times throughout the day, so it took me a few days to figure out what was going on. When I figured out that it was the new lightbulb that I had installed that was flickering, I pulled it out and put another EcoSmart bulb in from the 6-pack. And again, that replacement bulb flickered. Talk about frustrating!

So, I made a drive into town to the nearest Lowe’s and picked up a 6-pack of GE lightbulbs and installed one of those, just to rule out any issue my light socket and switch. The GE bulb worked flawlessly, just as had the previous bulbs I had before EcoSmart.

Where am I going with this? Well, when I discovered that the EcoSmart 6-pack of bulbs was defective, I went to Amazon.com to try to return them. There I got rejected because I was beyond the 30-day return policy, and they kept pushing me to contact the manufacturer Ugh! Having dealt with manufacturers for these kinds of issues before, I have found it a humongous waste of my time to try to squeeze juice out of that lemon. But I didn’t give up and even though Amazon made it very difficult to reach customer service with their automated system, I persisted and got through to a real live customer service rep. I then got an exception to the return policy and got a refund for the defective bulbs.

The Lesson Learned: it never hurts to ask!

The worst that could have happened was Amazon said no, and I would be back to square one. I think that a lot of people who find themselves in similar situations when they face that friction will stop. They’ll give up. They’ll take the hit because it’s not worth the time and effort. It’s only $30! What’s the big deal. The problem with that is that by making that decision, you are now carrying the cost of defective product. It’s failure to hold the manufacturer accountable for the product or service that they sold. I as a consumer should not carry the cost of defective product (and neither should Amazon for that matter).

It never hurts to ask for what you need and is fair. The best that can happen is you get what you need! The worst that can happen is you are in the same place you started from.


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