The Shredder Blade Guard
The first problem was that the dealers at Ivybridge told me the guard was £80 whereas Jan in Helston said there was a kit for £80 saving me £30 for the blade. The 270mm and 320mm blades are both priced £30.30 retail. £80 for a bit of plastic seemed totally unreasonable. I had multiple conversations over this issue and with Stihl.
- I queried customer services and technical support at Stihl and technical support confirmed the 'Shredder Starter Pack' was £80 and included the blade and fittings. Technical support could not explain why the guard alone was £80 and referred me to customer services.
- Customer services had no real idea of what I was talking about and referred me back to technical support to get the numbers of the parts.
By the time I called Stihl again I had found the starter pack on the website which now added to the problem. There were two packs prefixed 'Retro fitting'. One for the FS480 and one for a range including the FS460. The problem is that the two kits look identical but the one for the FS480 is £16 cheaper.
- So when I call customer services again I have another query. Not only am I querying the price of the guard at £80 and the kit at £80 but I have found two Retro kits that look the same but are priced differently. This didn't go down well as customer services were not sure where I was getting the information from, although I had explained.
- So it was back to technical support to confirm the numbers of the two starter packs on the website and the starter pack they had mentioned via the catalogue
Technical support directed me to a link on the website that would show me the catalogue that they were looking at. Following that I could see the Starter Pack they were talking about and discovered that on that page was the mysterious £80 guard that the dealer had wanted me to buy.
So here's part page 94 on the 2015 catalogue.
You can see top-right the 'shredder starter pack for £80
and bottom-left the guard only for £80
- So now fully armed I called customer services again to say the information was confusing and inconsistent only to be told at last that the catalogue price for the guard is an error. Of course I am still concerned that the dealer has quoted me the price from the catalogue. Still I can now buy the starter pack and not the shredder blade and guard separately.
- But there's now another problem. OK! I have got somewhere over the pricing and misrepresentation of the guard, but the starter pack has fittings in it, so I would have to buy those separately too. And this now becomes an issue.
- I notice that the image on the website of the starter pack is different from the one in the catalogue. So I call technical support to find out what the difference is and what I should get. They are getting a bit fed up with me and tell me to just buy the starter pack saying to ignore the images on the website as they may just be generic and not represent the actual items in the starter pack.
- I am not happy with this as not only have I found pricing errors I now have image errors so I speak to customer services again to say how unhappy I am that I have now been told not to trust the images of the parts I am about to buy. Customer Services don't know what I want, well they would say that, meaning they don't know what to do but tell me they will try and find out about the pricing but the catalogue has already been printed etc. and they will call me tomorrow.
This has taken me all day, and as I look at the on-line products and catalogue I find other queries arising. So on to Wednesday
Page 4 > To Wednesday
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