Problem Solved is a weekly consumer column that fixes reader problems. From broken laptop computers to faulty kitchen appliances, nothing is off limits for this feature. Each story brings a fresh problem and solution in an engaging and succinct Q&A format.
Laura Bartholomew’s new $1,856 GE washer rocked so hard on spin that it banged the walls. She called ten times. Five technicians came out. One tested it empty, another with four towels, and every report said it was working properly.
Luke Gilbertson’s dog Stewie was healthy when he booked a Rover sitter. Ring footage, he says, shows the sitter shut away for 17 of the 24 hours while Stewie swallowed something and vomited repeatedly. The vet bill came to $5,272.
An injury meant Andrew Greenman could no longer wear the $179 sneakers he bought on Amazon. After weeks of conflicting answers, an agent finally emailed him: the refund was coming in 24 to 48 hours. Then the money never arrived.
Adriana Gores overpaid her Comcast bill by $4,762 by mistake. Comcast refunded her on a prepaid debit card. The balance then dropped to $82, with a charge she says she never made and no statement showing where the money went.
Brian O’Leary needs accessible seating, and the Bruno Mars chart showed plenty of it. But every seat he selected came back unavailable, over and over. The next day the same seats reappeared, this time only through resellers, at a markup.
The dashboard of Jay Catelli’s Alfa Romeo Stelvio is separating from the air vents. His service contract covers interior surfaces. Mopar denied the claim, saying the part number sits on an exclusion list that appears nowhere in his own contract.
Craig Field bought tickets to a Rick Springfield concert through StubHub. The show was postponed once and given a new date. StubHub never updated the change in its own system.
On the day of the concert, with no tickets in hand, he called. The representative told him the system still showed the event as postponed. He explained that the show was happening that night. The agent could not release the tickets, and told him that without confirmation from the organizers or the venue, nobody higher up at StubHub could modify the record. The venue knew the concert was on. The promoter knew. Rick Springfield knew. The computer did not, and the computer was the only opinion that counted.
Stephen Stein had booked a two-bedroom suite at a Homewood Suites in Bonita Springs through Booking.com, and his party of three arrived to find the hotel had no reservation for them. He handed over the confirmation number. It made no difference. A family dinner was 90 minutes away, so while he waited on the phone with Booking.com and got nowhere, the group went and found another hotel themselves. The only rooms available were regular ones, so they took two, which came to $126 more than the suite they had already reserved. A representative promised to cover roughly half the difference. Then came the calls. Over the following days each conversation produced a new reason the payment could not yet be authorized, including a request to prove which currency he had paid in, for a Florida hotel booked on a US credit card.
Debbie McNulty had listed her vacation home on Furnished Finder for three years and never once received a booking through it. She paid the annual fee anyway. Now that she was renting short term again, the platform was no use to her at all. Her membership was set to auto-renew, and the company sent a reminder email the month before. She missed it, back from a two-week trip and buried under the same avalanche of email everyone else is buried under. Then she woke up to a $179 charge. She contacted the company that same day, asked to cancel, and requested her money back. What came back was a form response: fees are nonrefundable, it is in the terms you agreed to. She did not dispute that she had missed the deadline. Her question was different, and it is one worth sitting with. When a customer cancels on the very day the charge goes through, and has just told you plainly that she will not use a single day of the year she has been billed for, is keeping the money really the right call?
Two charges David Melton never made showed up on his PayPal account, both for sports tickets to a Knicks-Bulls game. One, for $1,098, hit a linked American Express card. The other, for $757, pushed his PayPal balance into the negative. Together they came to $1,855 for a game he had nothing to do with. So he did what you are supposed to do: he opened disputes with both PayPal and Amex. And both turned him down, telling him he had made the purchases. He had not, and he spent hours trying to piece together how it had even happened. Here is the trap that catches so many fraud victims. When someone gets into your account and buys something using your own credentials, the transaction can look perfectly legitimate to an automated security system. The computer sees a login with your name on it and assumes the charge is yours, which is very likely why both first-round disputes were denied without a human ever taking a real look.
