I USED to roll my eyes at all the anti Best Buy feelings on ATOT

[DJFuji]

Originally posted by: C'DaleRider
Oh well, so the web site was, in this case, ineptly designed.

I do notice a lot of BB haters here......wish all of you had a decently run one to shop in. I do agree that many of their employees do leave a lot to be desired in the "truthfullness" category when trying to upsell customers, which is their job.

Case in point....we bought, or actually my wife bought, one of the loss-leader Toshiba laptops at BB this past Black Friday. (I would have but I was "covering" another store that morning.) So, when the store opens, she takes her voucher for the laptop and heads off to find it. A Geek Squader "helps" her within 30 sec. on entering the store......seems they were specifically looking for the buyers of the loss-leader laptop and desktop computers that morning to upsell like crazy.

The young pup hands Debbie a sheet with a laundry list of things she "should buy" and "needs to buy to make the computer run right." (His words......I kid you not.) Since we were going to resell the thing, we were only interested in the laptop and nothing else......but he kept up with "You need these things or it won't work right."

Debbie actually had the acumen to finally say, after rejecting his "offers" three times (for junk like a Napster account, a portable surge suppressor, a spindle of CDRW discs, and such crap), "So, Toshiba actually is selling a computer that won't work out of the box? Seems to me that'd be like selling a car but you have to buy the engine separately after buying the car first."

That shut him up. Too funny.

On another note, I bought an Antec case two weeks ago from my local BB only to see it go on sale a week after my purchase......an instant rebate and a mail-in rebate. So, I'm in town on day 14 of my purchase and I go by the BB where I bought the case, which is now built up and humming along nicely. Do I get any static? Any grief in getting my refund on the difference in price? Nope......the CR was more than happy to do an exchange ticket and refund me the IR difference and then print out the mail-in rebate form for me to send in. No problem at all.....done in under 2 minutes and out the door with no hassle....and she smiled the whole time.

Of course, the kid two people ahead of me was trying to return some RAM he'd bought and began griping at the CR even before she got the "Can I help you?" out of her mouth. He was so loud and condescending in his attitude, it was no wonder that the CR was not very fast or much help. It wasn't her fault the kid didn't know the difference between DDR RAM and PC133 SDRAM.....he bought the wrong type of RAM for his Acer computer and broke the stick trying to jam it into the slot. Of course, it was BB's fault for selling him the "defective" RAM, even though it was in essence "operator stupidity."

In ten years of shopping at BB, I've had one bad experience and that was quickly cleared up the next morning with a single phone call....and no ranting or hissy fit was done, just a calm explaination of what happened and the manager took care of the problem without hesitation. I sometimes think a lot of the problems people have with a lot of stores are caused by going in with a chip on their shoulders, a bad attitude....almost an "I'm going to show you how mad I can be" attitude which in reality does nothing but get the person who can help in a mood to not want to do so.

I've got an issue with Circuit City to deal with tomorrow. I bought an Alpine CD deck for my beater yesterday. Today I noticed I was charged $4 in shop fees even though they did not install the deck....I did myself. So, later this morning, they'll either refund the $4 = tax or take the deck back and I'll go across the street to BB and buy one there. But at no time will I ever raise my voice, sneer, call names, or do what I see so many do when they have a problem......all things that do not help get any situation resolved.....instead usually just makes the situation worse.

I've seen so many complaints about all these stores, yet in my circle of friends and family, we rarely if ever have problems with any of these stores...outside of Wal-Mart, which is the real Satan in concrete.

Well said. I haven't really had a problem with BB either, but i tend not to shop there unless i absolutely have to. They even took back my $500 office 2003 that I won from Microsoft. BB is sort of like Fry's though...they do so much business that they dont really care about a few complaints here and there. When the whole world is knocking on your door, you dont take much notice to the little guy complaining about how he thinks your service sucks.

Now you want some "inept" service, go talk to Sprint. In 1 month they managed to make a total of SIX major errors in my service, two of which would have had me without phone service for almost a month if i didn't go complain about it. To add insult to injury, they overbilled me on top of that.

 

[torpid]

What did you do to try to remedy the situation after the second phone call? Did you call back and ask that they refund your shipping charges, which they will do in some circumstances? Did you ask to speak to a supervisor? Do you have a BB near you? If so, you can in fact return it there.

If you haven't actually done anything after the second phone call other than write some letter, I personally think that you are wayyyy overreacting.

 

[pulse8]

I've never ordered from any web site that was easy to cancel the order. The shipment always goes out and I either have to refuse the shipment or send it back myself.