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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."
Nice exaggeration. I looked at bestbuy.com to see what the price *really* was on the warranty.
I selected the Samsung Progressive-Scan DVD Player (DVD-P241) that was featured on their main page when I selected the DVD Players catagory. It's $59.99. The PSP on that item is $49.99.
Now, personally, I would more than likely NOT get this, even though it's a 4 year coverage. The player itself is only $10 more and in 4 years time, will end up even cheaper.
You just look silly when you exaggerate like that. What, are you going to say that it's orders of magnitude more expensive for the next comparison you attempt? =]
bork bork bork!
And the happy ending is, that you are still in business?
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia
For four years ending in early 2000, I owned a computer store.
Apparently it didn't work for him. I read "I owned" as "it went belly-up."
I'll feel sympathy for Best Buy having to deal with bargain hunters when it stops pushing local stores out of business and fucking up street traffic wherever it parks its fat ass. Aside from the sale items, I can get everything cheaper online, and from a local store called Central Computer, which is able to survive against the SF BB by sheer volume of potential customers.
If your revenue's greatest strength is the ignorance of your customers, your days are numbered.
I hope "Best" Buy goes down hard. They don't give one crap about their customers. "Best" Buy doesn't even come close to having the "Best" prices on items. Compare "Best" Buy with online-retailers, and you will see that "Best" Buy doesn't even come close in price.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
This article is so blatantly uninformed as to actual information that it's easy to see why the trolls attack Best Buy so badly. You have to realize a few major things here, and doing so will help you understand that things aren't quite as Demon/Angel as the article makes them out to be. First off, this "profiling" BB is being accused of, is crap. They're tailoring stores and associates to the area around them, not to specific customers. In Atlanta, we have a number of stores, one of which is being converted to the 'Barry' type listed in the article. Specifically, it's being converted because the store itself is situated in a high-income area, and the store itself has shown a history of large dollar value transactions. Now, when you come in the door at a BB, you don't go through a profiling process to see whether we should try and sell you products or not. When I work the sales floor, I'm as willing to spend time explaining a technology the customer has no interest in buying that day, as I am spending time selling a product to a customer willing to buy. I'm going to ask you questions, yes, but it's more for me to figure out what you're looking for than it is for me to 'pigeonhole' you so neatly that I can disregard your personality. That's not what we're trained to do by any means. I might use these questions to recommend additional products above and beyond what you expected to look at, but that's part of my job, and you don't have to buy anything you don't want. I've had more than one annoying customer who *refused* to buy a printer cable for their new printer, only to get home and realize it was totally non-functional without that cable. Having asked them ahead of time, I knew they did not have the proper cable to hook the unit up, and did my best to explain this to them.
Now, please understand that BB is a profit-based corporation. We prefer to make money on transactions, and that is one of the major goals of the store in the first place. Show me a major retail store who's primary goal isn't profit, and I'll show you a store going out of business. Having said that, profit is not the ONLY goal to which associates are looking toward. Customer satisfaction plays a (generally) equal role to profit, and it is the employee's job to balance that equation out. Now, when a choice comes forward between two equal options, obviously we're going to recommend the one which produces greater profit for the company, but if they're really equal in the first place, then the choice doesn't matter, does it? I see a lot of posts talking about how employees lie or cheat customers for store profit and advancement. This is NOT an accepted practice, nor is it indicative of BB specifically since all companies can suffer from this issue. At the same time, working in Customer Service and Geek Squad divisions has given me what is probably the best view on Customer Satisfaction issues, which is basically BB taking a loss of profit to solve a problem for a customer. I've authorized a brand new laptop for a customer who had theirs sent off to a vendor who 'lost' it in paperwork for three months (average repair time: 5 weeks), and then taken the heinous margin hit of having to sell a laptop as Used, and Missing Parts. We do what we can for customers, if we can, and if it's not such a horrible loss to the store that it would be an issue to accomplish.
The customer is not always right, better than 75% of the time they're completely wrong or totally uninformed. There are dozens of posts here saying that the user hates employees at retail stores because they don't know enough. I can sympathize, but you have to realize that the average customer knows a tenth of what the employee knows, who might know a tenth of what YOU know. So in reality, the majority of customers will look at an employee as a knowledgable person, because for the customer's needs, they are!
More than half the posts in this thread are rebate-bitching related. Get over it already, folks. Rebates are instituted by the manufacturer more often than anything else,
Believe it or not, alot of the crap Best Buy sells isn't crap, it's just expensive. The reason noone brings it back? Because it doesn't break until after the warranty expires. At that point, Best Buy's insurance option would kick in. It would then be returned by customer and replaced with the same item/deal. Broken item returned for refurbishing or replacement of item on extended warranty given to bulk customers, to be resold. Profit for all.
;). The reasons I'd rather shop at Best Buy for big purchases like that? 1-You can haggle. And having a wad of cash in hand, a really stubborn number that's not unreasonable but cheaper than anyone else and the arrogance of knowing you're going to make this month's commision bonus soar makes it pretty easy. 2-I can leave with the product for personal inspection, only to quickly come back and have it replaced when a flaw is found (but after the salesman's shift). 3-They tend to hire rather attractive and charismatic women, slingin that much cash around can get me some not-to unfriendly attention ;) 4-They do NOT have my credit card number. The only people I will ever trust with my credit card number is just exactly that--people. waiters, waitresses, realtors and bag checkers.
Sounds just a little too devious? Not really. But that's about 1/4 of their bottom line with a capitol cost of 1/10 of their budget. A hefty chunk of the rest comes from the little finance deals they offer with the majority of their big-ticket items like home theatres and computers.
Imagine getting a promise for oh, say $3000 in $60 in monthly increments for oh say 50 months. Now imagine having the authority to engage the deal but instill an annual premium hike to reflect the interest you enstated (without giving too much notice that it was going to happen), which could be as low as 3% but is usually about 12% or 13%. This premium hike is to allow you to pay off the entire debt due in time allotted on the contract. Whatever it is, they come out with at least $100 of sheer profit each year. On some purchases as high as $500, for 2 or so years.
Here's a question, would you pay $120/mo for a computer that would arguably still be quite impressive when you finally payed it off 5 or 6 years down the line? Well don't go to anybody who offers leasing cause you won't keep it and the shop is making a cool 3 or 4 grand. Don't go to anybody that offers financing because they're making the same amount of money and the item will probably have to be repaired as soon as the warranty (which will last til the end of the contract, if you opt for the insurance) runs out.
How about a nice, impressive (relative) car that you know you will have fun driving for as little as $300/mo for 5 years(don't forget the cost of full-coverage insurance, another $200 or so). You're single, have a budget of $3000 a month and have financial breathing room? Don't go to a car dealership. Nope, can't, you'll end up giving them an extra $5k minimum.
Don't forget, many of those online shops offer the exact same, except they often have your credit card number
In the end, I save and Best Buy gets reamed a little on their final bottom line. They want to finance it, they make more money in the end. The people who get paid comission however only get paid for their net monthly profit margin, get paid more if they sell it on the spot. Some also have the option to drop the price on it. These guys have a real potential to screw the bottom line and take them out nice and agonizingly slow.
If you're gonna gripe and moan about Best Buy over the online vendors, at least realize that the online vendors are not above automatically charging your credit or debit (ouch, seriously) card. And don't forget to tell us how to do it the really easy way: "DON'T BUY BEST BUY! BUY BEST BUY'S EMPLOYEES!".
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last