Don't buy from Sporty's !

Bottom line: You can't trust them and they will rip you off. For the rest of the story, continue reading.
Oh, they will not respond to your email either, but I digress…
I originally thought I should send Hal Shevers and the other members of the Sporty’s gang a letter to try to get this information across but then I realized that I don’t want to spend my time, effort and a 39 cent stamp trying to clue THEM in, I want to spend my time, effort, emails and blogs to try to clue YOU in, my fellow aviation consumers looking for good and safe places to shop. If you find this tale helpful in your buying decisions, please forward it around.
This tale starts when I decide to get another set of Bose Aviation X headsets. I have tried them all at this point and firmly believe that Bose makes the best ANR headset and that it really is worth the extra money. Since I already had a pair and did not need to be sold my main shopping consideration was to find the place with a good price and that I could trust would deliver. I also try to bias my decisions to local stores if possible, but nobody locally carried them so that did not need to be explored further.
If you search the internet for Bose Aviation X headsets you will find many vendors offering them for sale. You will see that they all offer them for the same price (this is Bose’s policy to the dealers to be an authorized dealer). The only differentiation will be how much they charge for shipping. You will find that it ranges from free shipping up to around $40 with Sporty’s being near the high end. But, I foolishly thought, I can use my AOPA card and member number to get a 5% discount from Sporty’s! I found the detail page, which is very long and pretty much contains all the same information that the Bose website has (remember this as it is important to the story). In the buy box right above the Add to Basket button there is a claim that they offer the best price and promise to match the advertised price, etc. Note that this is pointless since Bose does not allow any authorized dealer to advertise a price less than full retail so although their statement is true it is also deceptive. Anyway, I clicked the Add to Basket button and merrily started my path down the checkout trail. I get to step 2, shipping is $18.95, or $35.90 if I want it next day. Pretty close to the high end, but that is OK, I’ve got my AOPA discount to more than offset that. Next page, Step 3 all is cool, there is the area to enter my credit card info and my AOPA member number with a little note: (Needed for 5% AOPA Credit Card Discount). Cool! I enter the info and click confirm order. I get the order complete page and notice that the discount is not shown. Hmmm, wonder what is going on. I use their contact customer service feature to inquire as to why this is. They don’t answer. Next day I log onto my MBNA account and see that they have charged the full amount with no discount applied! I try another customer contact email and still get no answer. I now figure I had better call. They aren’t 7X24 so I have to call the next morning (two days into this saga). Of course the headsets have already shipped by this time but I get a human, they look up the order and I ask why the discount wasn’t applied. The immediately respond with “The Bose headset isn’t eligible for the discount”. I explain that I never saw that disclaimer anywhere in the order pipeline or when I was at the Add to Basket phase and if I had I would have bought them elsewhere. They agree, it isn’t shown anywhere in the checkout process because it doesn't need to be since if I would notice that if I scroll way down on the detail page in the product information box (you know, the same info I saw on the Bose website and that I didn’t need to read because I already own one pair of Bose headsets and already was convinced I wanted to buy the second pair) I would see a small print disclaimer saying “AOPA Discount not available on the Bose Aviation Headset X”. They whipped out this answer so quickly and smoothly that I assume that I am not the only one who has been stung by this “feature”. They then said, this is required by Bose. Interestingly the FTC banned MSRP price fixing scams a long time ago and now all a manufacturer can require is a Minimum Advertised Price (commonly referred to as MAP price) which limits what a retailer can show for pricing in advertisements but the retailer can sell it for whatever they want to. Take a look at sites like Amazon to see how they handle this. Basically, they show the MAP price with a note that to see the actually selling price you need to add it to the cart. Weird, but it does follow the MAP rules. One more layer of deception and untruth added to this transaction.

Now finally, to add insult to injury, if I had bought this from one of those sites offering free shipping and used my AOPA MasterCard I could have gone to the MBNA site and gotten the 5% discount applied to the purchase but alas, since Sporty’s offers a 5% AOPA related discount on some of their merchandise ALL of the purchases from their store are ineligible for the discount from MBNA/AOPA so I ended up paying about $68 more for this headset just for the pleasure of doing business with Sporty’s.

Buyer beware and shop safely out there!

So again, don’t buy from Sporty’s, Preferred Living, Wright Bros. Collection, Men’s Collection or Tool Shop. They don’t sell anything you can’t get someplace else, you will pay too much and you can’t trust them.

I imagine Sporty’s has a kennel full of trained attack lawyers so here I should probably mention that Sporty’s, Preferred Living, Wright Bros. Collection, Men’s Collection or Tool Shop are probably trademarks or service marks or some kind of mark of Sportsman’s Market, Inc. or some other mega conglomerate retailing overlord.