Guitar Hero recently rocked one consumer in a very unexpected way, according to The Dallas Morning News.

The paper's technology blogs reports that a woman named Jodi bought the extremely popular video game from Wal-Mart as a gift for her 16-year-old son. But when the young man opened the box, he discovered that it contained nothing but rocks and scraps of Chinese newspaper.

This kind of thing happens a lot in the electronics business -- either from internal theft or at the hands of devious customers. People will buy an item, bring it home, open it, put in an equivalent weight of rocks and shrink-wrap it back together. Then they'll return the box to the store as an "unopened" item.

Most retailers won't take responsibility in cases like these. Wal-Mart certainly didn't at first. It took a reporter calling the store to make them check their records. Turns out the particular unit in question had already been bought and returned once, so they were able to make Jodi whole with another unit.

But not everyone can have a newspaper reporter as their advocate. So be sure you have the merchandise you paid for before you actually leave the store!