Slashdot Mirror
Best Buy: 20% Of Customers Are Wrong
Mr Show writes "Ars Technica has an article up discussing Best Buy's strategies to drive off the deal hunters. It's a good follow up to the Slashdot story from back in July, and offers some details on what they're actually trying to do."
Yeah, but I think they've made it clear they don't want your business anyway :)
I wonder to myself ... what customer gave feedback that they wanted to the program to be more difficult to earn rewards?
The thing that worries me the most about this policy is the concept of quickly "pigeonholing" customers and treating them a certain way depending on how you have categorized them.
As a young adult, I run into plenty of prejudice among employees and managers (though most of it is annoying rather than seriously detrimental). Would they look at me, and decide, "Here is a young person. He doesn't have a lot of money, so we're not going to waste time helping him find what he wants, since he probably couldn't afford it anyway."
What if they do the same thing based on ethnicity? or noticable disability? or a myriad of other potential factors that go into stereotyping?
All I can do is hope that the free market will sort things out, and prove to Best Buy that this policy is hurtful to customers.
Love the Third Amendment?
They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts.
I wouldn't even stretch to call people who would do this shoppers. Thats not looking for the best deal, thats borderline robbery. If you engage in that sort of activity, I'm sure you promising to never shop there again is exactly what they want. Win/win.
They said they are putting their employees through hours of training on how to interview us customers.
Shouldn't they be training them on the stuff they sell?
Everytime I go in there to buy a camera, I'm usually faced with a deer-in-headlights sales man who only know how to say, "I'm sure it's in the manual." And I end up helping the poor helpless chap next to me who thinks a 9 mega pixel still camera will produce wide screen movies!!
Get real Best Buy!
Another trick Best Buy has is the extended warranty. It sounds like a great idea, and it is. Extended two year warranty, no questions asked, for a few extra dollars. However, you need the warranty receipt. Most people lose it after a few months, usually sooner, or totally forget about it. Two years is a long time. Only a small percentage of those who get the warranty actually cash it in so to speak. That's where a lot of their profits are coming from.
Kudos to the people who figured this out, but clearly it is costing Best Buy money. These are customers that should be weeded out. It's Best Buy's fault for allowing this scenario to happen.
Frankly, if they're not being evil, they're atleast being a bit cheeky. From TFA:
They ["devils"] slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge.
If they don't want to sell things at the lowest-price, then they shouldn't pledge to. Problem solved. But of course, that's no good, because what they really want is to give people the perception that they can get things for the lowest prices, without actually following through on it. My heart bleeds for them.
People are abusing those benefits Best Buy provides.
Using every loophole available isn't abuse. Its business. Do you think Best Buy's accountants look at some obscure tax regulation and say "well, this would save us alot of money, but it really wasn't meant to be used this way"? I don't think people owe corparations any more moral consideration than corporations typically excersize towards people.
I totally agree.
Why is it acceptable for a business to play the government's rules, but it is not acceptable for the consumers to play the business' rules?
Self-interest is what drives capitalism. Best Buy can suck it.
If you are hostile towards your customers (like the ??AA) your revenues will shrink, and you will find yourself in a viscious cycle fighting with your customers and losing money in the process!
Several years back, when the Diamond was a big name in the video card market, and 3dfx was the king of the hill, I frequented comp.hardware.ibm.pc.video -- many of the forum regulars made no bones about the fact that they were devil customers: They purposefully would "buy" a video card, hold it for just under the return period, and then return it. They'd get a full refund of their original purchase price which they'd use to buy whatever was new (again starting the return clock anew). These customers are hugely costly for retailers -- it would be better not to have them as customers (in fact you wish them on your competitors). This sort of person will rationalize their behaviour (much like the cable modem user who rationalizes saturating their connection 24 hours a day) under the guise of "if they let me, let them suck it!", but the end result is naturally restrictive policies that hurt everyone because of the abuses of a few. Simliarly it isn't cost effective to have customers who'll bogart your salespeople's time for hours while they ruminate over a trivial decision -- one which they'll likely recant on, reappearing in your returns line. These people do exist.