Chris H.
Yelp
BUYER BEWARE! I bought music here on and off for over 25 years, but never again. I am a CD holdout. While others embrace or re-embrace vinyl or flock to downloads and streaming, I still prefer CDs and feel they offer more bang for music buck than any other option, especially used. I have over 2,300 discs in my collection. Unfortunately, as my collection has grown and the general public abandons CD, the selection at Fantasyland has grown increasingly static. The CD inventory simply doesn't turn over like it used to and much of what I find there that I like I all ready own. I get that, but I've still enjoyed popping into Fantasyland and hunting for some obscurity or new discovery that I may have overlooked even though I'm buying less and searching harder. I've generally ended up picking up about 1-2 discs from them per month.
I don't especially care what a used disc looks like as long as it plays all the way through without skips and I had never, ever had a problem at Fantasyland until my last visit. I bought a fairly obscure solo album by Jon Anderson of Yes and headed to my car with it. My car stereo is nothing fancy, but it does the job. However, the disc had a major skip less than a minute into the first track. I took the disc out and saw a couple of gouges in the playing area that were likely the cause. So less than an hour after purchasing this CD I head back to Fantasyland to ask for my $7 back. I felt bad about it, but a disc that skips like that is simply no good to me.
Mark, who has worked there as long as I've been going there, cleaned the disc and tried it in the store player and it played OK so I agreed to try it again. However, the flaw was still there in my car so I made an audio recording of the skip on my phone as evidence and went back in again. Mark very graciously gave me my money back.
Unfortunately, Andy, the owner, decided to seize this opportunity to be bitter and snippy. He told me very haughtily not to ever expect a refund again unless it skipped in the store player when this was the first time I've EVER brought anything back. I replied that I couldn't believe he was giving me grief over a $7.00 CD I had bought less than an hour ago when I'd been coming there for so long. He tried to give me some sort of lame guilt trip over not buying enough and then told me I needed to get a decent CD player. Words were exchanged that are not suitable for reproduction on a "family" site and I am done with Fantasyland.
I'm sorry to say that Andy's approach to "customer service" is not that of a canny businessman. It's not as if I requested special treatment above and beyond what I'd expect from any retail outlet. Why should I accept store credit (as Andy implies I should have done in his comment below) and not my cash back when the defective item had been in my possession for less than an hour? Just be warned because if a music fanatic like me can get treated like that after so many years of shopping there, then the general public probably has absolutely no shot if you happen to have a problem with something you purchase at Fantasyland.
People should also be warned that they sometimes sell burned CD-Rs as "used" discs and also sell concert recordings burned onto CD-R for big $$ that are swapped for free on sites like dimeadozen.org and offered to members on the condition that they NOT be sold. Sketchy.