Vince Fuller wrote:
I've just had an absolutely terrible customer service experience with a ski
shop called Helm of Sun Valley in San Jose, California that I thought would
be worth sharing.

Back on April 7th, 2003, while on a ski trip in Whistler, British Columbia,
Canada, I purchased a pair of Volkl g3 Motion skis. I was quite happy with
the skis until March of this year, when I noticed that a 1-cm deep crack
had developed across the fiberglass upper surface of one ski. Clearly, this
should be a warranty issue, since a ski should not fail like this with less
than one year of use.

In an effort to have this problem resolved, I took the skis to Helm of Sun, a
shop with an apparently-good reputation, at least on my company's internal
ski list.

Next time call the Volkl (or whichever company) distributer directly,
and get shipping instructions from them. They might even have picked up
shipping themselves - often happens (or sometimes they have a local (in
San Jose - not likely, but Tahoe maybe, and certainly you're still
skiing, aren't you?) and you could just hand them over and pick up a new
pair on the spot, while the local rep takes care of business.

Helm only deals with the US distributer, not Euro or Canuck distributers.

BTW, it wasn't clear to me what was wrong with the skis. A "one cm deep"
crack would have gone right through the skis and they would be broken,
so I discount that phrase; so what actually was wrong with the skis?
Cosmetics? Or structural? If structural why didn't they break, as would
be expected? If cosmetic, why are you bothering?