In the fall of 2016, my husband saw an advertisement on television for the ListenClear hearing aid.
My husband is 54 years old, completely deaf in one ear and has limited hearing in the other ear. I have taken him to specialists who offered a hearing aid for him which would have cost us in the neighborhood of $11,000. When he saw a hearing aid he could try with no obligation for about $1,000, he was very excited about it.
Our family has had a difficult year. Our situation is unique. You probably won’t have the same experience as us, but even in a world where you won’t get precisely the same experience, you might still run into an experience which leaves something to be desired.
My husband has some cognitive issues … He cannot remember things sometimes, and he processes things slowly, differently than he did before he had several strokes and a brain tumor. The trial period for the hearing aid was nearly up, and when he asked for a return label (it didn’t work for him at all) the person on the other end of the phone kept convincing him to try it for a little while longer. He actually didn’t try it any longer — it just sat in a drawer.
I kept getting anxious about this hearing aid sitting around our house — worried that we might be charged for it. Finally, I asked for a return label via email. They sent me one. A few weeks later, I got around to putting it all together to send the hearing aid back. My son landed in the hospital. My husband doesn’t hear well, sleeps a lot during the day, and I thought “He won’t hear the UPS man when they come to pick this up.” I tried to find a location where I could drop the hearing aid off on my way to work. Unfortunately, there were two men fighting outside of the one location that was open early in the morning. I didn’t get out of my car.
I work at the post office. I weighed out the pros and cons of shipping it USPS and just having it out of our lives vs trying to get it to a UPS driver. I decided I would rather pay for shipping the hearing aid than have to mess with it any further. BIG MISTAKE.
ListenClear’s return process is totally geared toward receiving their product back through the expected channel – UPS. I sent the package back via USPS priority mail. I remember having the receipt with the tracking number in my hand and thinking “I should snap a picture of this right quick …” Wish I had listened to that inner voice. Wish I had taken time off work in the middle of the day to go to UPS down the street. Should have … Could have … Would have. Didn’t.
I tucked the receipt in my wallet next to the cash. Someone in my own household stole the cash from my wallet — my son has had a problem with drugs. When the cash was taken, the receipt disappeared. No big deal … What are the odds that ListenClear would not get their package? It’s my best guess that they DID receive the package, but I cannot prove it. I spoke with someone who indicated that when a package comes back any other way than UPS, they have a great deal of difficulty tracking that it came back and counting that it came back correctly to the right account.
ListenClear insists that they didn’t get the package back. In spite of the fact that I have the date, the approximate time, the specific location (a self serve kiosk in the post office building where I work) and that I WORK at the post office, nobody at the post office could help me try and retrieve the lost tracking number.
A string of really, really, bad luck. These things surely won’t happen to you, but maybe you should consider that the hearing aid DID NOT WORK for my husband. It amplified the sound in a way that caused ringing in his ears and didn’t give him any better hearing. Shouldn’t that make you pause and consider that you might have the same experience? Would you want to be forced to pay for a hearing aid that didn’t work for you, you returned it, they lost it in their own warehouse? Nobody wins here.
You cannot win with ListenClear. We didn’t win. We lost the money for the hearing aid.