Last Friday (16th May) I bought the new Blur album from my local
Tesco.  Getting it home I discovered that the CD was "copy protected".
This information was only present on the back cover of the CD's
booklet and so I was not able to see this when before purchasing the
CD.

Upon attempting to access the CD in my PC, my PC hung and had to be
hard reset to work.  I decided to take the CD back and ask for a
refund.  I was informed by the employee manning the store's customer
service desk that it was Tesco's policy that if a customer had a
problem with a CD, a DVD or a piece of software then Tesco would
replace it with another copy of the same product.  Therefore my only
option was to replace my corrupt Blur CD with another corrupt Blur CD!

The staff member was unsympathetic to the argument that this would do
me no good.  He didn't care that the CD did not carry a warning of its
copy protection on its outer packaging.  He certainly wasn't
interested in techicalities such as whether it was correct to call the
corrupt disk a CD or not.  Basically, I'd bought a deliberately
corrupt product from Tesco and I had to lump it.  Both a refund and
exchanging it for another CD were out of the question.

He did state that the policy was in place to prevent people buying
from CDs/DVDs/software, pirating and returning them.  Great,
non-labelling of corrupt CDs and a draconian returns policy, all under
one roof!  I wouldn't buy gifts at Tesco, you could have a problem
changing them if you buy a duplicate CD or a game for the wrong
platform...

After making some fuss and demanding to speak to a manager (though I
only actually got to speak to a supervisor) they agreed to refund my
cash "just this once", more to get me out of the store than anything
else.

So, while back in April Tesco told you that they were looking into the
issue, they've either not decided anything yet or have settled on a
very consumer-unfriendly policy.