Slashdot Mirror
360 Bundles Lead To Best Buy Housecleaning
Groo Wanderer writes "At the launch of the XBox 360, there were reports of forced and unwanted bundling by several companies, most notably Best Buy. There were things said back and forth, and the usual corporate banter. They have followed through, this time, and a good number of people lost their jobs." From the article: "We are told a manager that started the procedure is no longer employed at Best Buy. At least one senior district manager is no longer employed, and some of the nailings are rumored to have gone even higher. The big yellow inquisition did not stop there, and several other managers and assorted white collar workers were given an escorted walk to the parking lot."
I don't get it, what is wrong with a store saying "Sure I will sell you this thing you really want, but at the price I want to charge. I will even include some crap you don't really want, but you still have to pay the price I want to charge"
Seems that if you don't want to pay the price you go elsewhere or you don't buy the product.
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory.
LAWYER: What of the reports of the Rebel fleet massing near Best Buy?
GATES: It is of no concern. Soon the Rebellion will be crushed and young Sony will be one of us! Your work here is finished, my friend. Go out to the command ship and await my orders.
About time someone cleaned up those stores a bit. Dirty bastards with all that yellow and blue...nauseating.
Whenever Mrs. Fitch breaks wind, we beat the dog.
They put policies in place which make retail managers feel pressured to pump up their sales figures by "forcing" excessive bundles on desperate (and foolish) pre-Christmas X-Box 360 buyers.
Then, when they get heat for it, they respond by firing the retail managers, but keep all the largesse of the whole scam firmly in their pockets.
And we are supposed to take this as an indicator that they are interested in doing the right thing?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It was a case of Bait and Switch. Where corporate placed certain ads and press releases, along with various guidelines how to handle matters, while people below were doing something different.
Best Buy had to sell the 360 at a certain price point, and that price was seemingly far below what the demand for the 360's was. So from a certain perspective, the bundles make sense if you're trying to make supply meet demand.
On the other hand, we told our son we'd get him an XBox for Christmas since the price should go down with the 360 coming out. I figured they would go down to $129 or maybe even $99 if we were lucky. And then what happens? They throw in a cruddy racing game and jack the price of the original XBox UP by $30 to $179! The racing game isn't too bad, but it isn't a game we would have chosen to buy if it weren't bundled with the system. I don't like what they did, so I can understand peoples' complaints, but I see very little difference between what Microsoft has done with the original XBox and what Best Buy has done with the XBox 360.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
They have to move those titles somehow...
I suggest they move it to "waste management"
BestBuy: good concept, bad execution.
The bundling was "forced" on buyers. The buy itself wasn't forced.
It's a "don't be an ass to your customers" issue.
Congrats to Best Buy for at least appearing to fix the problem.
"They have to move those titles somehow..."
The titles weren't the problem. Best Buy left it open which games you could buy, and there were multiple games that everyone wanted (Perfect Dark Zero, COD2, PGR3, Kameo).
The problem was many Best Buy stores *forced* you to purchase certain accessories. One of the bundles included 2 games and a wireless adapter (waste of money) the other forced controllers and recharge packs.
You have to read all the articles, not just the attached one, but the three articles at the beginning of the referenced one. This wasn't just bundling, this was bait and switch.
Here's an example snippet from one of those articles:
TMCnet news reports similar events in Spokane, WA. Best Buy's Sunday ad offered the Xbox 360 for $299 dollars, but a sign was posted at the store on Tuesday as a "correction notice" to inform customers that they could only buy package deals starting at $569.93.
If best buy advertises something for $299, and doesn't actually have that item but has a similar one that's more expensive, that's bait and switch, and it's illegal in the United States. You cannot advertise one price for one model or package then sell another model/package that has more features but at a higher price simply because you never had that model. The ad said they were selling it so they better sell it. In fact, the law states that those people had the right to demand the higher bundle for the lower price, but I infer from the article that Best Buy obfuscated this enough so that few to none of the people scammed were able to catch that when they first went in.
And to top it all off, companies should and do go out of their way to avoid these mistakes, because the law also says that if a company does make this mistake, customers have every right to take advantage of it. This is to make sure companies don't up and use the "oops, That's a mistake in the ad we don't stock that. Gee, that's 4 mistakes in just one month, sorry, but I do have the higher end model for you if you like."
If it were a simple stock out that's one thing but some stores never even stocked one of the nonbundled console.
This smacks of a small time conspiracy but it's most definitely illegal. Best Buy is cleaning house to make it look like they care and showing good will so as to deflect any consumer lawsuits.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I got my 360 at Costco, bundled with an extra wireless controller, Kameo, and 1 play and charge kit. That was the only configuration they offered. But I was going to buy both accessories for sure and Kameo was already a "maybe" for me. So if you calculated the bundled accessories at retail price (Have you seen *any* 360 stuff below retail? Not me.), Kameo came out to a price of $10. So basically, it was $50 below the total retail price of the items in the bundle. I acceptd a lack of choice in exchange for a discount. Seemed fair to me.
But advertising a bare 360 and then not offering it is, in fact, scummy. And seriously - how many launch day 360 buyers were really going to walk out of the store without some games and controllers? Why anger and alienate your market by forcing them to make purchases many would make without the extra pressure?
I don't know. I've just never read anything good about them.
This article assumes that this is not a witchhunt. To me, this sounds a lot like corporate ass-covering.
I would not be surprised if the people at the top of this fiasco covered through their underlings to the lions to save their own asses.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
As there were only a handful of stores that participated in the "forced bundling" shenanigans, you can't exactly say it was a corporate policy. Therefore, yeah, lower managers *are* the culprits.
I agree with you on this. Christmas is a non-day for me. I don't go anywhere NEAR malls for the 4 weeks preceding, and the week following. I don't buy presents, and I don't receive any. For those reading, scoff if you must, but I'm willing to bet that I get through it MUCH better off than most people (no debt, no stress).
Let's look at why this happened:
What happens? The people at the end of this chain get cut off. Aren't we supposed to be hating on Microsoft here?
that BestBuy has to sell the xbox at the price microsoft tells them to sell it at. It's called price fixing. Microsoft could fine BestBuy for jacking up the price or not selling the xbox unless people were to buy accessories with it. Our BestBuy just had a line outside of people waiting to buy xboxes, and gave out tickets to people, and when they came in, they let the first people buy the xboxes, accessories or no accessories. The only thing is, there is almost no margin on an xbox 360 for the retailers. Same goes for iPods. But when a product is so high in the demand, the retailer has to sell it at that price, or loose customers. Thats why BestBuy will push a Rio Karma or other off whack mp3 player over an iPod/iTunes any day. Napster and BestBuy are making sweet love right now. iPods are used to lure people in, and then they sell you a Rio Karma. The xbox 360 lures you in, and you buy a high margin 3rd party controler. They shouldn't force anything on you, but they can bug the hell out of you about it.
Sig: I stole this sig.
You overestimate the ethics of Best Buy. They fired the whistleblowers. They fired the ones who came up with the policy allowing partial returns on the bundles. When accounting found out they lost millions on returns and the bad press from the leaks heads rolled alright. Just not the ones insinuated in the article.
Yes and No. The situation you describe is boderline legal at best. The fact that the car is still on the show room floor (it was just sold) is why its not illegal straight up. Laws preventing bait and switch were designed to prevent exactly what you describe from happening. In this case i suppose either no has filed a case with the FTC yet against your employer or your employer is succesfully nagivating the thin line of legality. In any case, Best Buy can't actually do that as they have no way to even pretend that they just sold out of the lower priced item. And even if they could legally skate the same line, there's no way they would want to in this case due to the PR hit they are taking right now.
You misread the sentence. The point here is that 360 tries to get rid of its surplus of lead by bundling it with housecleaning from Best Buy.
sudo ergo sum
Dixons/PC World in the UK recently got bust for advertising a cheap laptop and not having sufficient stock at the advertised price. (Their response was something along the lines of, "we never expected such a big response".) Admittedly it was the advertising standards authority that bust them, which amounted to little more than "don't do it again" and a very stern look.
We have the same thing in the U.S., here it just falls under the large umbrella of "false advertising," which varies state by state but usually allows a person to sue for damages. However it's sometimes rather tough to prove damages and I have a feeling in this instance that the company can probably protect themselves (as they're doing) by firing all the people involved and swearing they won't do it again.
a dvertising.htm
But if you did run into blatant false advertising, the way to go would be to contact your state's Consumer Protection office, if it has one, or the Attorney General (who can file suit against the company on behalf of the state).
Here's an overview of Consumer Protection laws in one U.S. state (New York):
http://www.consumer.state.ny.us/clahm/clahm-false
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think you are substantially underappreciating the instinctive ability of "inbred deliverance-manchild-like retard fucks" to find ways to humiliate others in the most effective ways possible.
They didn't need to be told, people like that are more than capable of figuring things out for themselves.
Or did you never get bullied in elementary school? The average schoolyard bully might be dumber than a bag of hammers, but they always have an eerie propensity for figuring out exactly how to humiliate others. It's the same thing, writ large.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Erm, no.
The advertising was printed up by corporate, which indicated what should have been happening in the stores. I've worked retail -- you don't get much say at the store level into what kind of promotions you're going to sell or not; what gets printed in the flyer is what happens. If the flyer says "Widget x now $150!" you'd best have Widget X on the shelves for $150, or you're going to have problems.
What Best Buy is claiming (and based on my own retail experience, seems quite believable) is that some managers decided to basically disregard the published advertisements that they were supposed to be honoring, and instead sell the units they had only in bundes, in order to maximize their add-on dollars. And in order to do this, they put up false notices of a "correction" to the advertising flyers.
This is false advertising, this is illegal. It looks bad for Best Buy as a company, and probably opens them up to liability if someone can show damages as a result.
From Best Buy's perspective, the problem wasn't in the printing of the flyers -- it wasn't like they just misprinted, or forgot to put the bundles in there or something -- it was with the managers who were effectively insubordinate, and didn't follow the published promotions.
Now, with that said, there are some obvious 'corporate culture' problems here also. Like, why were the store managers being put under so much pressure to generate add-on dollars, that they chose to do something like this? That's the real question, and I can only hope that after Best Buy makes it's first pass through (the 'ritual bloodletting' stage of PR-disaster management), that they'll put some thought into how to fix their system, because it's clearly not working.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No, that's not a problem at all.
Your car dealer or your grocery store would both be within their rights to do those kind of promotions. Bundling, by itself, isn't illegal.
Look at cable TV and cable internet -- cable internet alone (if you can get it) might cost $80 a month, but buy it along with digital cable television, and it's only $35 a month!
You have every right to complain, but nobody is going to take you seriously. There's nothing wrong with that promotion (provided they're not abusing a monopoly power or violating the antitrust laws in some other way). Where the problems start is if they advertised "Cable Internet only $35/mo.!" without saying anything about the bundle, and then you walked down to your cable office, and asked to get service, and they said "oh, well to get that price, you have to buy x, y, and z, too." That's false advertising, and to avoid this the ads usually have an asterisk somewhere and a small print that explains the "promotional pricing." Thus a smart consumer (one who reads the ad) can figure out what they're getting into. Personally I think those kinds of "asterisk offers" are still mildly deceptive, but they're legal.
Best Buy's problem was that the advertising flyers didn't say anything about only being able to get xBoxes in bundles, they advertised (presumably) both the bundled and un-bundled price. But some store managers decided to only sell them in bundles, and disregard the un-bundled advertised price. That's where they cross the line into false advertising.
The bundling itself isn't a problem, it's how it was advertised.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
if the sales being conducted were the positive kind instead of the negative cold/forced sales approach. As in politics, there are good scenarios and bad scenarios; positive and negative. In good sales, both of the parties feel like they're getting a good or fair deal. In bad sales, one of the parties is trying to pull a fast one on the other party.
Negative sales models are often in evidence in organizations where the business model itself is unsustainable (most common in my opinion) or where the owner is trying to be greedy (not as common in my opinion). EB Games has to do volume on game products because they add almost no value to the sale and therefore get very little margin on each sale. However, it's tough to do volume on a product that moves at about $50 USD per unit on games, $150-$400 on systems, etc. These are expensive products we're talking about here.
EG Games sells only game products; it's all they have. So, what does EB games have to do? Negative sales.
So, all I'm saying here is that you shouldn't let your impression of sales in general be permanently molded by the likes of EB Games. They do not appear to be long for this world and many will fall with them unless something in the games industry substantially changes.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!