Walmart's customer service

I know it's rarely cool to admit that one likes Walmart, but I'm going to do it anyway: I like Walmart.  I'm fortunate that the Walmarts by me are fairly new or newly remodeled, so they're clean, well managed, and organized.  They're also in a good area so the people who work and shop there aren't what you'd typically see on People of Walmart. It's actually a nice and pleasant place to shop.

About 2 weeks ago, I had to replace my laptop's cooling pad after my husband ninja kicked it in his sleep and broke the leg stand off.  I can't say I've had a tremendous amount of luck with that particular cooling pad, but it's the best deal for the buck so I keep resorting to it. I've had maybe 5 of them in the past 2-3 years.  I think most of them died due to dog hair. One died because something (read: hair tie I think) slipped into the fan and burned it out.  I ordered a new one off of Walmart.com.  I've been using it for about weeks and this morning, when I went to fire up my laptop, the cooling pad sounded like something was caught in it, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I sprayed it clean with canned air. I shook it to see if there was any rattling. Nada.  I plugged it back in, and putter, putter, putter, poof, dead.  My laptop runs hot...like Arizona desert hot, so I desperately need a cooling pad for it.  I looked up my order online and realized that it's only 2 weeks old, so I could pretty much definitely take it back to Walmart.  I had 2 options:

I could buy a new one in the store (they cost about $10 more in store) and swap it out with the broken one then return it.

Or I could not mess with karma, be honest, and see what they could do for me.

I opted to not mess with karma and called my local Walmart and briefly explained my situation involving an online order. I was promptly forwarded to an Assistant Manager named Kirk.  I explained my situation to him in detail, and he did explain that an exchange between online purchases for an in store item is typically not done because of inventory, price, overhead, and just the fact that most stores don't really treat their online presence the same as their in store presence.  In fact, some store's online presence is managed and operated independently or outsourced so it's treated completely separate from their brick and mortar stores.   Because online stores lack the overhead that brick and mortar stores do, their prices are cheaper and physical stores do not honor online prices for this reason. (Target does the same thing.)  Kirk put me on hold to do some research on my matter and to see what he could do for me.  After a bit of a wait, he came back on the phone to inform me that he'll make an exception to the rule and get me taken care of. He said to go ahead and bring the broken cooling pad in and as long as they have the identical thing in stock, he'll take care of me and get it exchanged. He explained that normally, they'd send it back to Walmart.com and issue a refund so that I can purchase another one...which normally would've been fine but I needed a cooling pad now because my laptop runs soooo hot.

I half expected the exchange to be a huge hassle but true to word, Kirk the Assistant Manager took care of me and my dilemma.  For that I am truly happy and felt I got great customer service.  That makes me want to continue to shop with Walmart and don't mind admitting that I like them.