Ehhh...I did have a similar experience at a local shop. I purchased a "new" STI Spartan at full retail, which at the time was $660. (Sidebar: nice 1911 for the money.) What with one thing and another, I didn't have a chance to fool with it for a couple of days. Then I field stripped it and started to look it over prior to cleaning it...and lo and behold, it wasn't exactly in new condition. You could see discoloration on the breech face and when I looked in the barrel, holy s**t - seriously leaded, like someone had been firing a lot of wadcutters through it and hadn't cleaned it.
Not wanting to fly off the handle, I took the piece to another store where I'd done business and asked them to take a look - is this a new gun, etc. The guy there looked for five seconds and said no way this is new, the barrel's filthy and the breech face shouldn't look like this on a new gun, because a couple of proofing rounds wouldn't leave this much discoloration. Nice piece, but...not new. So I took it back to the original shop, which had three or four other customers there at the time. Owner said Hi, howya doing, etc...I said, well, I've got a problem - the Spartan you sold me as a new gun isn't a new gun. I haven't fired it or cleaned it, take a look - this isn't right. So he looked and came up with some bull**** about how somebody else at the store must have taken it out to do target shooting. I said fine, but then it's not a new gun, I paid for a new gun and you need to make this right. He had another Spartan in stock which he traded me for the original one, and I field stripped it on the spot and checked the barrel with a bore light - it was clean and pristine, in other words new. He reworked the paperwork to account for the different serial numbers and I was satisfied, he made it right.
(Leaving aside that if one of MY employees had done something like that, he'd have been gone so fast it would have taken a week for his posterior to catch up with him. Borrowing a new gun from under the counter to go target shooting? Um, no. You want to shoot that new gun, buy it. Kind of like a car salesman borrowing a new Corvette off the lot for a weekend drive to Vegas, bringing it back, rolling the odometer and selling it as a new car.)
Not wanting to fly off the handle, I took the piece to another store where I'd done business and asked them to take a look - is this a new gun, etc. The guy there looked for five seconds and said no way this is new, the barrel's filthy and the breech face shouldn't look like this on a new gun, because a couple of proofing rounds wouldn't leave this much discoloration. Nice piece, but...not new. So I took it back to the original shop, which had three or four other customers there at the time. Owner said Hi, howya doing, etc...I said, well, I've got a problem - the Spartan you sold me as a new gun isn't a new gun. I haven't fired it or cleaned it, take a look - this isn't right. So he looked and came up with some bull**** about how somebody else at the store must have taken it out to do target shooting. I said fine, but then it's not a new gun, I paid for a new gun and you need to make this right. He had another Spartan in stock which he traded me for the original one, and I field stripped it on the spot and checked the barrel with a bore light - it was clean and pristine, in other words new. He reworked the paperwork to account for the different serial numbers and I was satisfied, he made it right.
(Leaving aside that if one of MY employees had done something like that, he'd have been gone so fast it would have taken a week for his posterior to catch up with him. Borrowing a new gun from under the counter to go target shooting? Um, no. You want to shoot that new gun, buy it. Kind of like a car salesman borrowing a new Corvette off the lot for a weekend drive to Vegas, bringing it back, rolling the odometer and selling it as a new car.)
