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."

Comments

Why is bundling wrong?

[Fatchap]

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.

Re:Why is bundling wrong?

[voice_of_all_reason]

Because Best Buy is a chain. Each store has its own boss, but they still have to answer to the Big Boss. In other words, they were already bound by a previous deal

Best Buy's don paid for all the Xboxes, which he then sold to his capos. One of the terms of this sale was that "youse hafta agrees wit company polisees, capiche?"

Re:Why is bundling wrong?

[AKAImBatman]

From a consumer perspective, the store is misusing its position (being one of the few stores with a limited stock of the product) to force you to pay higher costs that you don't want to pay to get extra products you don't want just so you can have the core product that you DID want. This is different than just charging a higher price due to limited availability.

From the store's perspective, this is bad because it probably drove a lot of customers into the arms of competitors. Which means that customers they might have counted on to come back to purchase games and accessories will now turn to online stores or other retailers for their needs.

THAT is what's so wrong.

Oh, and it can attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commission for anti-consumer practices.

Re:Why is bundling wrong?

[bVork]

The problem is that they advertised the real $399 price and didn't honour it. This is a classic bait-and-switch.

There were also rumours that some EBs and GameStops were fiddling with the pre-order wait list based on how many games and peripherals were also pre-ordered. Does anyone have more information on that?

Re:Why is bundling wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm hiding as a coward for this one. I'm an ex-EB employee and still know a lot of the managers around my area personally. And yes, they do have a tendency to play with presell lists and call people who ordered more first instead of who ordered first. They also forced bundles on the customers. They do it because of pressure from the GM to meet the add-on numbers set for each store (which is pretty much impossible without breaking the rules.)

This is also how the featured game of the month works, also. No matter how bad it is, each store has to sell a certain amount, and people do get fired when they're not met (even when the game was Turok and the number worked out to 20 in an hour every hour, even though the store was lucky to get 20 people in some days.)

Managers that have stores that don't meet the numbers are first sent off to work in the crappiest stores, sometimes forced to demote themselves (with a threat of just being fired otherwise) and then promptly let go within a few months.

EB Games has to be one of the worst companies I've ever worked for. I'm glad it was just a job I had while looking for real work instead of a career like it is for some of the managers.

Lemme git this straight...

[Golias]

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?

Re:Lemme git this straight...

[ThePlague]

It's the classic "bad apple" tactic. Just have very stringent policies in place, but make the goals such that it's either difficult or impossible to meet without breaking those policies. If no one notices, promotions all around. If someone calls them on it, then an easy scapegoat and much haughty pointing to the policy. Either way, the organization wins. Abu Grahib was a perfect example of that and this Best Buy ploy is another. Of course, I'm not saying they are of equal importance or ramification at all, rather the technique is identical.

Bait and switch, not bundling

[hellfire]

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.

Can't resist

[the-amazing-blob]

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.

NOBODY expects the big yellow inquisition!