Deal with Atari hardware long enough, and sooner or later you're going to come across "Best Electronics" (http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/). While I haven't done a ton of research on the company, I gather that at one point they were a (or possibly THE) official Atari repair shop. When Atari called it quits from the gaming biz, Best ended up with most, if not all, of the leftover stock of systems, games, accessories, repair parts and miscellany.
The first thing you're likely to notice is that browsing their website is like time-traveling to the early nineties. Seriously, just fire it up and you'll see what I mean. Monolithic old-school HTML pages complete with in-line gifs, center-justified spacing, funky font color transitions, and yes, a hit counter at the bottom of the page! The whole thing is disorganized and difficult to wrap your brain around, but kind of fun if you aren't in a hurry to find useful information.
Some pricing is available on the webpage, but they reserve the complete price list for their printed catalog which they insist on selling for a profit.
Browse the web page long enough and you'll come across references to their "##+ year Atari tech". If you're a fan of Top Gear, this is basically their version "The Stig". A mysterious man (or woman!) identified only by reputation and credential. And they are very rare to miss an opportunity to evoke the ##+ year Atari tech.
I've only dealt with them a handful of times over the years, and it is always something of a charming hassle.
They seem acutely aware of the need to protect their profit margins, as any business should, but it emerges in some annoying and disingenuous ways. For example, they set minimum order amounts which change from time to time. The justification for this is the cost to ship. They absolutely will not budge from these minimums - even if you eliminate their excuse by offering to pay the extra shipping and processing costs. Furthermore, their vaunted parts catalog cannot be counted toward the minimum order amount.
On top of the minimum order amount, they charge a healthy handling fee.
So I wanted to buy a sealed copy of the Tempest 2000 soundtrack. This is a $5 item. The minimum order amount at the time was $20. When I offered to pay whatever extra they thought necessary to offset the cost of dealing with small orders, they resorted to what I have classically termed "the idiot's defense" - that is when faced with a rebuttal which logically defeats your given reason, you simply return to the beginning of the loop and start repeating the already-defeated premise of your argument. This is not to say that they are under any obligation to allow me to circumvent their minimum order policy, but that I would appreciate it if they would be honest about the policy and just state up front that the minimum is there to make sure you buy more stuff, not to offset the cost of dealing with small orders.
But I digress. So I wanted to buy something that costs $5, and at the time that was the only thing I wanted. I attempted to quickly scour the website for something that would help me meet the minimum while I had them on the phone, but as I stated earlier, it's not what I would call organized. I ended up hanging up with them and calling back to complete the order after finding that they sell the Jaguar cart connectors for $15. I will probably never need one, but as I only have one Jaguar, replacement parts are somewhat appealing. So now I had an order for $20. Then, of course, they had to apply "Shipping" costs on top of that, which came to about $1 million space bucks. Seriously, though it was about $8. That was ALMOST cheaper than buying a new copy of the Tempest 2000 soundtrack from Ebay.
While I ended up spending more than I really wanted to, I got what I wanted and a little something extra so I called it a wash. Not a great experience, but not a terrible one either.
So recently I got the urge to clean up and mod a Lynx II handheld (which is a story for another day). One of the last parts I needed was a replacement lens piece for front of the system. The one I had was in really good shape except for a rather prominent crack in the upper left corner. It didn't cover any of the visible part of the screen, but my OCD just wouldn't let it go. In searching around for where I might source a replacement, I came across several mentions that Best Electronics still sells replacements for $20. The newest of those posts was from 2014. I wasn't sure if they would still have any of the screen lenses in stock, so I sent them an email.
Email conversations with Best Electronics is something of a trip. If you scroll down to the bottom of their home page, there's rather a lengthy diatribe about SPAM and the formatting of email inquiries. That in itself is a little strange, but the fun really begins when the conversation starts. Firstly, they seem to bounce the messages through multiple mailboxes - some in front of the SPAM filters, and some evidently behind. I received a reply from a different email address and some explanation about Yahoo mail being blocked etc... Since their filters reject any message beginning with "Re:" or "Fw:", they prepend the outgoing subject with "More" instead.
When you send them a message they attempt to fit it into a Q&A format. Though a little weird, I found it to be very refreshing because it provides evidence that they actually read your message for comprehension.
For example, I sent something to the effect of:
Hello,
Do you have any replacement clear screen covers for Lynx II, and if so please quote me a price.
And they replied with something like:
Dear Customer Person,
Q: "Do you have any Lynx II screen covers"
A: "Yes we have those"
I'm paraphrasing of course, but you get the idea. It took a couple more messages for me to actually get pricing from them, and to my dismay the price had lept up to $35 for the replacement screen. But when you're the only source left, you can kinda get away with charging what you want. That's almost as much as I paid for the Lynx II I was modding, but I eventually convinced myself it was worth it to get a perfect brand new screen cover.
When the part arrived I realized immediately that it was not the brand new part I thought it was, but a used part. It was in pretty good condition, but for $35 it should have been flawless, and it wasn't.
When I reached out to them to ask if it could be replaced with an actual new one, they evoked the 34+ Year Atari tech (lol), and explained that the Stig had personally pulled that screen from a brand new defective Lynx II, and that all of the "new" parts were gone. While it may have technically been "brand new defective", given the scratches on it, it was not "uncirculated".
They continued to respond in the Q&A format even when it ceased to make sense, and offered a refund. Of course they were not going to pay for the shipping, so I would have been out something like $14 and still left with a cracked screen cover, so I decided to keep it, but I'll probably never deal with them again after that experience.
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