Need advice on broken pedal

Hey all...

I rented a Cry-baby pedal from Long & McQuade because my own Cry-baby broke down on me during a gig and I didn't have time to have it fixed yet. Anyway, I've been renting this Crybaby for 3 weeks now and it hasn't worked properly for the last 2 weeks. The first gig I used it at, it worked fine. At the second gig, I noticed that the guitar signal was much quieter when the pedal was in bypass mode than it was when the signal was effected by the Crybaby. This made me think that perhaps just the battery was dying. Subsequently, just before the third gig, I quickly replaced the battery but didn't have time to test the pedal before going on stage. Alas, the piece of **** worsened, and the effected signal was the only signal working. The bypassed signal was completely cut out (or intermittent). The irony here, folks, is that the back-up Crybaby I rented to replace my own broken Crybaby seems to be broken too (through no apparent fault of my own).

What should I do? I don't want to pay for this pedal, especially when I didn't do anything to it. For that matter, most guitar pedals are very durable and it would take extreme abuse to break them. I'm worried Long & McQuade are going to say, 'well why didn't you bring it back right away when you knew something was wrong?'. But truth is, I've just been too busy between work and university to get the time to go by the store (and also I thought it was a battery issue). Should I not even say anything about it not working? Do you think they'll try and charge me? What a friggin' stupid predicament.

My advice is bite the bullet and go in to the store. Tell them this exact story and they will probably be cool about it. Honesty really does work to your advantage in situations like this.

Or you could return it then throw a fire bomb into the store and they will never know that it was broken. ;)

If I were you I'd take it back and tell em it just stopped working recently. Not the honest truth, but it's you or them.

Chances are they'll take it back no questions asked. If they felt like charging you extra for it that means a possible lawsuit for them, attorney fees would cost more for them than to just absorb the cost of the broken pedal. But I seriously doubt it would ever get that far :p

Long & McQuade rocks... right now, they're fixing my two year old Dunlop 535QC wah for free, even though it's almost a year out of warranty. I originally thought that my Visa would double the manufacturer's warranty, but I had bought the wah used, so it didn't. But, when I explained it the the boys at L&M, they said that they'd do it for free!

So, if your local L&M is anything like the one here in T.O., I'd say bring it back, explain it to them, and they'll probably figure that the pedal was broken or breaking down before you rented it.

If it had happened to me, I seriously doubt the Long & McQuade folks would come after me for repair costs. That's one of the costs of renting out equipment; you have to figure that some of it will get broken.