Best Buy Sucks #3

According to the Hartford Courant, Best Buy has confirmed that they have an intranet site that can only be accessed by employees that looks almost identical to the internet site. Apparently, employees of Best Buy have used this intranet site to deny customers discounts that were advertised on the company's internet site. Could Best Buy be intentionally misleading customers by advertising one price on the internet, but then having sales people pull-up the identical looking intranet site inside the store with a different price? I certainly hope not, but it's hard to imagine that in a tech-savvy store like Best Buy, the salesperson couldn't have just checked the price displayed advertised on the web.

Fading Receipts

The purpose of a receipt is to provide a customer with a record of purchase. It used to be that you could throw your receipts in a shoe box and look at them later when you needed to. However, many stores think that this record only needs to last a few weeks. They use crappy (cheap?) thermal paper receipts, which are quite useless. They fade and become unreadable very quickly.

Shouldn't it be fraud if a store requires a receipt for a return, but knowlingly provides a receipt that doesn't last the entire warranty period? I purchased a new battery for my car recently at Advance Auto Parts. It has a five year warranty. The sales representative actually suggested that I make a photocopy of the receipt because, "the receipt sure isn't going to last that long".

My favorite (*wink*) store, Best Buy, also has ridiculously pathetic receipts.

While I am at it, I am also getting fed up with receipt-checking at the exit and those long receipts filled with survey solicitations, coupons and other such nonesense.

Best Buy Sucks #2

I have found an interesting way to determine which companies are the worst. Look for Google hit counts for "xxxx sucks". Here are some results for several companies that I would rant about and several I would rave about. Can you tell which is which?

Microsoft (86,100 hits)
Cingular (17,700 hits)
Best Buy (13,300 hits)
Ticketmaster (696 hits)
Vonage (656 hits)
CompUSA (418 hits)
Taco Bell (281 hits)
Costco (234 hits)
Chipotle (48 hits)
Pixar (26 hits)
Wegmans (22 hits)

That really hits where it hurts.

Best Buy Sucks

A recent bad experience at Best Buy has pushed me over the edge, and I refuse to shop there any more. My girlfriend purchased a television and after we lugged it to her home (27" CRT - heavy and bulky) we found that it would shut off for no apparent reason. We lugged the TV back to Best Buy for an exchange. The new TV seemed to work, until it started to do the same thing after about 30 days. The problem is that the warranty was only good for 30 days. After arguing with the Best Buy folks that the TV was clearly defective when purchased, they agreed to send a technician to repair the TV. The technician who came knew exactly what the problem was. "It's the flyback transformer. This TV has a problem with that. We get this all the time." Well, the problem did not go away after the technician's "repair", so we went back to Best Buy to return the TV. They did not want to take it. Even though they were knowingly selling a defective TV, they hid behind their warranty limitations and did not want to take it back. Finally the agreed to an exchange for another TV. We said "Hell no" since we don't trust Best Buy for TV's anymore. Ultimately the best we could do was get them to allow an exchange for other merchandise. They would not give us store credit (we had to do the exchange THAT day) and they would not refund our money.

The worst part of the story was the Store Manager said that it was not possible for him to give us store credit or a refund. That the "system" would not allow him to issue a credit/refund. If he was lying, shame on him. And that is reason enough to never shop at Best Buy again. If he was telling the truth, then nobody should ever buy anything at Best Buy. Any store that does not empower the store manager to deal with customers is not fit to be in business.

That really blows my fuse.