Recently we had a very sad day in the Mahoney household. I reached into my handbag to grab my Kindle and found this:
As you can see, the screen is cracked making the text illegible. Bad news.
I am not sure exactly how or when this happened, I had been carrying my Kindle around for several days but hadn’t taken it out for a while and I don’t recall anything particularly aggressive happening to my bag while it was in there. The only thing I can think of is maybe my water bottle landed on it when I dropped it in the bag? Luckily knowing exactly how it broke was a not necessary because Amazon didn’t ask for an explanation.
I did some googling and discovered that other Kindle owners had experienced broken screens and Amazon replaced their Kindles for no charge, no questions asked when the kindle is within its one year warranty. Still, I was skeptical.
After procrastinating for a few days, not wanting to hear the (potentially) bad news that I would have to purchase a new Kindle (because not having one was not an option, there is no way I could go back to only reading paper books…I LOVE my kindle), I called Amazon Kindle Support. 1-866-321-8851
And the others were right! After a few quick questions (ex: had I restarted my kindle by holding the power button for 10 seconds?) and verifying my account information and mailing address a new working kindle was headed my way. It arrived in about two days and I was able to download all of my previously purchased content with out a hitch.
Overall I am incredibly impressed with Amazon’s customer service and response time. True, I probably could have been more careful with my Kindle, but strangely I never really thought of my Kindle as a fragile device. I am surprised I had never even considered what would happen if my kindle broke. It never even occurred to me to wonder what would happen to all the books I had purchased if I no longer could access them.
If you are wondering why a big business like Amazon would replace a broken kindle, I was too. I think the answer is twofold. First, if I, the current kindle user, don’t have a Kindle, I won’t purchase any more books. And second, Amazon likely wants to avoid any and all bad press around the device, so, in order to propagate future momentum and sales, they want to make sure there are zero unhappy users out there. Either way, it works for me. I Love my Kindle even more after loosing it.
And the big take away here is that I finally bought a case (From Amazon, see they are already generating more revenue by sending me a working kindle.) Two cases actually, one for me and one for Dennis. I don’t want to find out whether there is a double replacement policy…
p.s. Speaking of that case, have you heard of Amazon Warehouse Deals? I purchased my “like new” case “used” from amazon for half the price. Amazon re-sells returned items which could have been re-packaged or have minor cosmetic flaws on the packaging and sells them as used. Amazing find, I am going to be using this a lot going forward 🙂
The Traveling Mahoneys 