Amazon doles out $50 credit to HD DVD buyers
Seattle (WA) - Amazon.com has announced that it will offer a $50 store credit to anyone who bought an HD DVD player from the online store before February 23.
The move mimicks a service offered by Best Buy earlier this year, automatically sending out a $50 gift card to those who purchased an HD DVD player.
Amazon.com sent out an e-mail to affected customers with a $50 promotion code, which is valid through April 9, 2009. Consumers received a $50 credit for every HD DVD player they purchased, up to 10 for a maximum credit of $500.
"New technologies don’t always work out as planned. We at Amazon.com value our customer relationships more than anything," said Amazon in the e-mail.
In addition to Amazon and Best Buy, Circuit City and Wal-Mart have also begun offering special refund policies for HD DVD players.
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Why are we refunding the early adopters? When there is a format war, everybody knows there will be casualties. People should also have seen the weeks and weeks of announcements of companies switching to BluRay and relised that something was up (way before feb 23rd). It is not only companies & investors that can back a failing format but consumers as well. If they didn't want to wait and see who won the war, and enjoyed HD-DVD titles in the meantime, then good luck to them, but shops refunding them is just wrong - it wasn't the shops that decided the war it was the PS3 & the executives who couldn't see past sales figures to the various format's pros & cons.
Hopefully this will teach technology companies in the future to sort out their differences just as they did with the original DVD.