Wal-Mart Woes

I don't think I have ever heard of anyone having trouble returning an item to Wal-Mart. My cousin's husband (my cousin-in-law??) bought himself a Playstation 3 at Wal-Mart on December 30th. He had been wanting one and called to see if they had any in stock and they said they had just gotten one that day so we drove there and got it. Paid cash for it too.
It worked fine for about a month or so but then, suddenly, it just stopped powering on. His first instinct was to call Sony. For some reason they told him he could send it in for repair but they would charge him $125. This didn't sound right to me but that doesn't matter now.

He still has his purchase receipt so he decided to exchange it at Wal-Mart. He now lives in Van Buren so he tried taking it there first. When he bought it there was a special offer inside to get (5) free Blu-ray movies so he sent in the offer, which required he cut the original UPC code of the box. The Wal-Mart person removed the PS3 from the box to verify the serial number. They told him something didn't match so he would have to return it at the store he purchased it from.

He drives to Fort Smith only to be told that the serial number of this unit indicates it was bought at Best Buy! They even called Best Buy and confirmed that it was true. They even knew that the unit had been bought at their store on November 30th and the name of the customer! He maintained that he DID buy it at Wal-Mart and he had the receipt to prove it. They argued that there was NO WAY that PS3 was sold at Wal-Mart. He ended up talking to a couple of "managers" who practically accused him of trying to pull a scam and they refused to take it back. The theory is that the guy who bought it at Best Buy, for some reason, put it into a box that came from Wal-Mart and was able to return it. They must not have opened it to verify the serial number on the unit itself. So now he's stuck with a $400+ game system that won't work and Wal-Mart thinks he is a liar.

He put in a call to the corporate office and they are supposed to be calling him back in a couple of days. He even had his mother-in-law (my aunt) try to return it herself and she ran into the same problem. Then she tried taking it to Best Buy and they wouldn't take it back either because no extended service plan was purchased.

Obviously someone at Wal-Mart did the very thing they are accusing him of doing. They took back a PS3 that was actually sold at Best Buy and they the re-sold it! But now they are claiming that that is an impossible scenario. What they should do is check their records and see who returned a PS3 on or around December 30th and see if that name matches the purchaser in Best Buy's system.

Hopefully someone at the corporate office will be able to get something done. I didn't even know that the stores kept track of serial numbers like that.