I worked for Goody’s Family Clothing for an 8 year span that ended in January of 2009 when the company laid everyone off and filed for bankruptcy. But we were a HUGE dell shop to say the least. Our data center might as well have been sponsored by Dell, our desktop PC’s and laptops were all dell’s, the store servers we were running were actually Dell GX260 and Dell GX270 optiplex desktops. It wasn’t unusual to walk the halls of the corporate office and see Dell cardboard boxes everywhere from the latest shipment of PC’s to come in.
And I know many people that have or had Dell’s as a personal computer at home, I know I used to.
But while at Goody’s we had a strange issue come up and it took some battles with Dell to get them to repair the systems across the company.
At first it wasn’t an issue as we had one optiplex system fail about every week or two. We would open the call and Dell would come out and put a new board in for us and the system would get back up.
Well we started seeing a high failure rate and eventually got someone at Dell to say that we may have bad capacitors on our boards. In fact one of our directions was to go to each computer if I recall correctly and look at the capacitors on the motherboard to see if they were swollen, a sure fire sign the board was about to die.
Eventually Dell did replace the motherboards in the systems across the company, but this was years ago. Today I came across an article that explains how Dell knew that the optiplex models had bad hardware and that Dell was knowingly replacing bad hardware, with bad hardware!!
Want to know the really funny thing here? At one point, 1,000 computers that Dell delivered to the law firm that was defending it in the suit started failing, and the computer maker allegedly “balked” at fixing them!!
Really? Not only do your computers fail, but you send FAULTY computers to the law firm defending you in your case regarding selling faulty computers? I can’t even make this stuff up. No wonder Dell is tanking. Below is a view of the companies stock over the last 10 years. Notice, once upon a time the were a great company, but the span in which these faulty computers were sold was between 2003-2005 which as you can see in the chart is the point the company was rebounding a bit… Then came the year where the issues starting occuring and the company steadily tanked.
I could add a witty comment here on how dell sold crap which they knew was crap (according to the new documents) but I won’t, I think the collapse of dell is inevitable. Now that this report and new documents have come out Dell who is already struggling is going to have one heck of a time trying to come back after this revelation.
The best article I came across was regarding this was written by the NY Times, however for me to post the article on my blog they wanted me to pay $1,260!! Umm, I don’t think so. So instead of linking to them directly I’ll link to a number of other sources where you can read up on this. I linked directly to the article so clicking the url below will take you straight to it.
Well the bankruptcy papers arrived a week ago from Goody’s Family Clothing and I have delayed filling them out due to my own ignorance of the legal system. It’s funny you go to school and learn about the three branches of the government, you learn about the justice system but the one thing they don’t teach you is how to fill out a legal claims form. I realize this event doesn’t happen to most people, but then again I never get stopped on the street and asked what the three branches of government are called. So I did what anyone would do, I called my dad who is a lawyer and said “help!!” The consensus was fill out the pink and yellow forms. Basically fill them all out and let the lawyers for Goody’s figure out which one is necessary. Besides, it seems silly to file a claim for money from a company that not only went bankrupt but is non-existent. I hear there are still remnants of the company left but honestly I couldn’t care less what happens to that company at this point. Lots of great experience came from my 7 years at Goody’s. But then with good came bad including layoffs like clock-work. I worked with some fantastic people and some that could only be described as bottom dweller scum suckers. Lots of those critical life lessons you hear about. All experiences I truly value, but definitely time to move on.
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