Dell crowned Bad Santa computer maker by angry customers
Holiday card labelled a 'joke'
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Dell customers are furious at the computer maker after it failed to deliver products in time for the holiday season, and instead offered a "Holiday Card" to place under their Christmas trees to replace undelivered gifts.
The company issued a statement on 17 December in which it said that it had been hit by order delays due to "increased demand [and] industry-wide constraints on some components".
"Especially at this time of year, we are sorry for the frustration," wrote Dell chief blogger Lionel Menchaca on the Direct2Dell site.
He said some Dell products had been affected by shortages of memory and larger capacity hard drives.
However, customers are continuing to complain about Dell's increasingly lacklustre delivery performance.
"Dell had been taking orders and assigning delivery dates of 2-3 weeks out," one customer told The Register.
"So for folks ordering late November, a mid December date was promised. As that date got close, the delivery date would slip a week. A week later, it would slip another week and so on. For some unexplained reason, Dell somehow forgot how to answer customer's emails leaving them in the dark."
He claimed that Dell's automated processing system to notify customers of delays was suffering regular outages, preventing many from tracking their orders with the company.
Similarly customers have griped in the comments section on the Direct2Dell blog.
"It's frustrating because Dell is accepting orders that they are not able to fulfill and they expect their customers to sit by until they get their inventory in order," grumbled meechigan.
"Most of us ordered a computer because we wanted it or needed it for a specific purpose. I understand minor delays but this is ridiculous and a bad business practice.
"Dell has not sent any updates or options for modifying the order which they are unable to fulfill. If the world is running out of high capacity hard drives, then perhaps Dell should not sell computers configured to have those unavailable parts."
We asked Dell to comment on this story, but at time of writing it hadn't got back to us with a statement.
Meanwhile the firm's EMEA flak, James Gibb, responded to Twitter user dell_ruins_xmas on 18 December.
"Genuinely sorry for the delays here Dan [AKA dell_ruins_xmas]. I know you've seen the blog from Lionel and we are trying to address these issues," he said.
However, since then, the dell_ruins_xmas Twitter account has mysteriously disappeared. ®
COMMENTS
a card? are they f'ing kidding?
Look, a week or two for a custom PC is not a big deal. After that, the price shifts, and I'd expect to AUTOMATICALLY receive either cash back equal to the difference between the price I paid and the lowest price offered during that backurder timeframe, or upgrades to the best system components that equal the performance of the price point. Additionally, if the delay exceeded 4 weeks, or especially if it missed a major holiday delivery without indivation is would, I'd expect additional compensation.
Last time I custom ordered, it was a GateWay notebook, over 4 years ago. GateWay delayed delivery about 4 weeks due to problems acquiring the particular high performance HDD I had requested. By the 2nd week I had confirmation of the delay, and they discounted the order $75 as that was the new price point. On week 3 they offered a RAM upgrade in addition to the discount. Finally, they made an offer of a step up in model, keeping all the other offers intact, which included a better CPU and GPU, and i had the machine 2 days later. Had i bought that configuration 4 weeks earlier it would have been nearly $250 more.
I'd still be a Gateway customer today if they still made and sold decent high end laptops, but they folded and make crap now. Instead i got a MacBook Pro for the wife in November... which was the best machine I could get at my predetermined price point. (Dell has nothing to compare to a top end 15" MacBook Pro, nor does HP or Acer or Lenovo, best I found with the same specs was either a 9+lb 17" with a 2 hour battery that cost $400 more, or a weaker system with poor graphics for $200 more). She's got 10.6 and Win 7 on it and it plays DDO in a VM with a better framerate than my desktop with a 8800GT, and stomps my desktop performance when running win7 natively.
Nice trolling
The simple fact is that Dell agreed these delivery dates at the outset, if they couldn't meet the order delivery dates they should not have accepted the orders. Common sense states that if someone says can you deliver on such and such date, you check that you are actually able to complete the delivery before saying yes. Simple isn't it.
Should've left it...
... back in Limerick where the workers did a stonking job of making sure Dell kept SOME sort of reputation.
Serves them right for outsourcing from their new Polish factory.
Idiots. Glad I bought all my xmas purchases elsewhere.

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