Day 474: The Walmart Battery Tug-of-War

We woke up to another cold morning, this time in the parking lot of the Walmart of Susanville, CA:

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Last night I attempted to exchange our RV batteries at Walmart. Since we live in an RV, I scan and throw away everything.  Unfortunately, Walmart changed it’s policy a year or so ago and now requires the original receipt.  This seems silly to me, as the Walmart register system knows from the barcode if the receipt is valid, to prevent people from returning the same item twice using one receipt, for example.  If the barcode is scanable, and the receipt is valid, why does the kind of paper it’s printed on matter?

When I called the Susanville Walmart from the parking lot, for whatever reason they said that a copy of receipt would be fine, so I took one of my two batteries in for exchange, as this has gone wrong too many times to go to the trouble of removing both batteries from the RV.  When I took in the battery, they said that since the battery didn’t say “2 year replacement” on it, the battery had no warranty at all.  I knew this was wrong, and eventually persuaded them to attempt the exchange, which of course worked.

The folks at the service counter weren’t sure this was OK, so they wouldn’t do the second battery without talking to the store manager.  This morning, I took the second battery in and the store manager was there.  He had a battery tester, which they didn’t use last night.  Thankfully the battery tested as bad, and he allowed me to exchange the battery.  So we now have two new batteries, and these batteries now have original receipts which I will be putting in ziplock bags and taping to the batteries.

After installing the new batteries, we drove southeast to Reno.  There, we topped off our diesel and refilled our propane at an incredible $1.86 per gallon!  We then continued on to overnight at the Walmart of Fallon, Nevada.  See the trip map for driving details and our current location.

RV Trips from the Late ‘90s Added to LookBeforeYouLive
Day 475: The Final Push

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