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Best Buy Confirms 'Secret' Version of its Website
Iberian writes "The Courant site confirms an oft-rumoured possibility: Best Buy does indeed maintain a second website for what one could assume is for the purpose of defrauding its customers. State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ordered the investigation into Best Buy's practices on Feb. 9 after columnist George Gombossy disclosed the website and showed how employees at two Connecticut stores used it to deny customers a $150 discount on a computer advertised on BestBuy.com. Says Gombossy, 'What is more troubling to me, and to some Best Buy customers, is that even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price. [State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal] said that because of the fuzzy responses from Best Buy, he has yet to figure out the real motivation behind the intranet site and whether sales people are encouraged to use it to cheat customers.'"
.....err, never mind.
The GeekSquad charges a $29 Software Installation fee to let you use the "real" internet inside BestBuy so this lady would have only saved $121.00 anyway.
I checked a price online last week, went in, and they checked and it was different.
Wait for the flood of OMG CORPORATIONS posts to follow...
-- pupkick
Best Buy has a modest contract with Accenture (old Author Anderson) helping them re-design their IT. Coincidence?
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Companies will go to great lengths to price discriminate (i.e. sell to different customers at different prices). If intentional, this particularly dirty trick might have the following reasoning: A customer sees a price online, but wants the item more quickly. So the customer heads to the local Best Buy, where the prices are supposed to be the same as what's online (unless specifically marked as an online-only special). By this time, the customer has demonstrated his or her willingness to buy the product and invested the time and energy required to get to the store. At this point it's likely that they are willing to pay more than the online listed price, and buy the item anyway.
Another possibility is just that Best Buy doesn't want to market online prices as "online only" and that people who walk into the store and pay a higher price won't notice unless they look for the same item online (which most presumably don't).
This reminds me of the whole amazon.com pricing PR disaster from a few years back. IIRC, it involved people who were logged in seeing a different price than those who were just surfing casually. By knowing your previous purchasing history, amazon.com could reasonably mark up items it thought you might be willing to pay more for. I don't know what happened to the program, I thought it just went away because of the PR nightmare.
It'd be interesting to know just what's legal and what's not with some of these new tactics. Not all price discrimination is illegal; consider "student" or "senior" discounts, for example. Of course, avoiding a PR mess is probably enough to keep most companies from trying legal but dirty tactics.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Is this illegal? I'd imagine not.
yea used to work in the Big Blue and I remember that... To put a little foot forward for at least my store and me, I figured out that the intranet site listed store prices after the second person complained to me. After that I used one of our laptops with wireless to get onto the internet site.
Honestly, I think it's not a management plan to rip people off, they just like to keep the internet best buy and store best buy separate so when a rep logs onto the computer you see your store's price... and reps' ignorance ends up screwing people over.
Anyway my $.02 to try and throw out some facts and before everyone replies I know it was/is still a bad idea just throwing the facts out as I heard them
While I hope that a heavy and hefty lawsuit comes of this, I still believe that it wouldn't be enough for Best Buy to shake their poor business tactics. They certainly, and routinely pull scams on customers such as misquoting prices, bait and switch, and not producing products as advertised.
I entered in a lengthy battle with Best Buy some years ago, when not finding the advertised product in the package. The fight lasted for 3 weeks, after which I had invested countless hours, and spoke with a chain of people, ending with the Vice President of Customer Relations, who also didn't give a damn.
Just goes to show you that the poor practices can filter down from the top. I'm sure my complaint to the BBB just got lost among the thousands. All I can do is keep people I know from supporting them.
Best Buy to Outsource IT to Accenture
Best Buy reassesses IT Needs
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This happened to me a year or two ago when I went to buy a digital camera at BB. The camera was cheaper online and when I told the salesman he tried to verify it and it wasn't there. I ended up going across the street to Circuit City which has full internet access...ordered the camera from bestbuy.com with in store pickup, went back to bestbuy and picked it up for that internet price.
Annoying though, and I hope they get a lot of heat for it (was also in CT btw)
It is very common for retail outlets to keep 2 books. Normally it is the other way around with them showing the customer the more expensive "cost" price.
A few months ago I looked up the price on a digital camera online. Walked in the store and got on one of their terminals to double check the price and it wasn't there. I asked an employee about the camera and the deal I saw. She said that the computers in the store don't show all of the internet deals. In order for her to check the price, she had to authenticate as an employee and then access the real site.
I was still able to get the deal, but only after she ringed it up as "Matching a Competitor's Price." I'm curious if they don't even have some of deals on the in-store computers, which is why they are not on the intranet site. But if this is so, they should advertise the price online as offered exclusively on the web.
It seems to me, they're trying very hard to keep the best deals away from those who don't put the research in or ask enough questions.
So your comparison of Best Buy to Enron because of Enron's affiliation with Arthur Andersen (and BB's current affiliation with Accenture) is completely false.
Where good old corporate ripoffs and deceptive trade practices are just chalked up to hard-nosed business practices. Perfectly legal and ethical. And if they're not legal they should be. That's where we're headed. Back to the 1880s.
I highly doubt sales people would be in on such a conspiracy. A company like Best Buy has sales people coming and going all the time. If someone got pissed because they were fired, the first thing they'd do would be blow the whistle on this. If these price differences are even deliberate, it's done strictly by the people managing the two websites. The sales reps would be told to sell at the intranet website's price, and are probably unaware of the fact that there's a different version of bestbuy.com at work than there is at home, let alone that the prices are different in order to screw the consumer. It may be a conspiracy, but it's not involving every sales rep at every Best Buy in the country.
Why do people continue to shop at a Retailer who is known for treating customers like E-Tards and continually abuses them and lies to them and most likely commits bait-n-switch?
Having worked for these slimy bastards for a few months, I'm willing to bet that "not showing customers the lowest price" is the least of the shit that goes on.
I'd rather whore myself out to a thousand fat chicks for fifty bucks each than work there ever again. The whoring would pay a lot better, too.
...to never shop at Best Buy.
When I get pricing online and go to a store to get an item, I print out the webpage to take with me. Best Buy is the last place I go to get electronics/appliances/music, anyway.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I have a domain that I bought on ebay for a dollar. It's misspelled but it's also extremely handy. Each time I have to go register on a web site some where, I register as (nameofwebsite)@mydomain.com. Then if I start getting spam, I know who sold me out. I bought something on-line from Best Buy's web site and so of course I register as bestbuy@mydomain.com. Lo and behold, I start getting a ton of spam addressed to bestbuy@mydomain.com. My first missive was polite, asking why they're sending me these emails. When I contact them about it, I'm told that it can't possibly be coming from them.
When I write them the second time, I'm still polite and explain that they must be sending them because that's the only place I've used this particular email address. They write back and insist quite rudely that I must have used this email address to register somewhere else. Furthermore, they're quite rude in insisting that they're not spamming me and asked me why I was so stupid as to think that they were. "Surely you realize that a reputable company like Best Buy wouldn't spam you."
My third missive wasn't polite at all. I rather pointedly asked them if they were mentally deficient or inbred, since they seemed to be too slow to pick up on the fact that they were corresponding with me at the email address of bestbuy@mydomain.com. And as I pointed out to them, I am not likely to be using this anywhere else. It has be used in one place and one place only and that is their web site. I also tell them that they don't get my email address back from people that they have so rudely, and in violation of their own privacy policy, ho'd it out to, that I'll be doing some spamming of my own. Groups like the State Attorney General's office, FCC, UseNet, anyone and everyone else I can think of that might be remotely interested.
Finally I got a letter back from Best Buy claiming that a security breach had "liberated my email address". I called the person that sent me the letter. He was rather nicer than the nimrods I'd been dealing with. When I asked if they had filed the proper disclosure, which is required in several states in which Best Buy operates, I got a long awkward pause and he finally admitted that one of their employees had been busted selling email addresses harvested by the web site. When I asked if they were at least terminating the miscreant, I was told that they were not. That was the last time I ever purchased anything in a Best Buy.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Anyway, I was an employee at BBY when they started this switch, and, embarrasingly enough, I didn't notice the switch for over 2 months - and I was a customer service senior. They never even bothered to tell us!! (and i worked at Richfield, MN - just across the street from corporate HQ) - they were most probably thinking that we would deny the price match out of ignorance.
But, in my stores defense, once we found out of the switch we checked through the internet website and even went as far as printing it off if they had to go to another store to pick up the item.
Basically, with any corporation you will have great stores and horrible stores - it all depends on who the GM is. I've had good ones that make a great customer atmosphere and horrible GM's that make me deny price matches and basically be a bitch to the customer. But one thing I've found to be true no matter what GM I have is that the customer initiatives at the corporate level are in the right place - which is much more than I can say for most other Fortune 500 companies out there.
Slash-for-Thought
I guess this will be Texas style web sites.
I found out the other day that my hosting company, DailyRazor.com, pulls a cute little trick - they have these offers that say you get x number of months of free hosting with y number of months pre-paid. So you buy the account thinking that as long as you've paid by the deadline, you're ok. It so happens that if you didn't enter a specific "coupon code" when you signed up, you forfeit the free hosting. At the bottom of their sign up form, it says, "Have a coupone? Enter it here..." - when I think of a "coupon" I think of a piece of paper that I might have received in the mail, or seen in a magazine. I didn't have either of these, so I didn't enter anything. I didn't give it a second thought until I saw that they issued my second invoice two months early. I have been going back and forth with them over this, and as of yet, they have refused to make any concessions. If you need servlet-based hosting, avoid the hassle and look for another company.
This is another great example of the resurgence of reputation as a means of social pressure. Before we had the web, advertising could completely drown out the occasional TV report from your local consumer affairs reporter. Today though, anyone who cares about getting what they pay for can trivially check up on the vendor in question.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Chapters / Indigo is a large (the largest?) bookstore chain in Canada. They have many brick and mortar locations, as well as a large online e-commerce website selling books, DVDs, etc. In their brick and mortar stores, they have computer terminals with a web browser, accessible by the public, providing access to a clone of their internet website. These computers are handy, because unlike the public internet version, they tell you which shelf or section of the store a given book appears on if it can be found in the store.
The big difference, however, is that this on-site version of the website features prices much higher than the EXACT SAME PRODUCTS if you were to search them from the company's e-commerce website on the public internet. All while looking visually identical to the website as if you had accessed it from home (or from your laptop in the in-store coffee shop's WiFi).
Having said this, I have never had a Chapters staff member try and convince me of an item's price because of how it appeared on their in-store computers. It just seems sleazy to have it look exactly the same (except for the stealthy higher prices), but maybe it can just be chalked up to laziness by some web programmer on their company IT staff.
First of all, I didn't know this was a "secret". I've seen it myself. It may have the same color scheme, but it looks noticeably different (no "top 10 tips to buy a new TV" or big flashy mini-ads or any of that crap). The purpose? If a customer wants to buy something that's out of stock or internet-only or something, the employee takes the customer's information and logs in using his employee ID. I've never used this part, but the customer supposedly pays in-store, then the employee puts the confirmation number into the site, and the item is either shipped to the customer or the store.
(CompUSA has a similar site, though in their case the customer (usually business account customers) can access it too -- http://compusabusiness.com/ )
Now, I'm interested in seeing what the result of the investigation is, but this doesn't seem to scream conspiracy. Maybe there was a discrepancy, and the employee pointed to that site because, well, that's the site he always uses. I make a best buy purchase every couple weeks, and always check the site first (mostly because best buy's stock sucks, and I have to figure out which of the 2 stores in town has what I need), and I have never seen a price discrepancy between bestbuy.com and in-store.
Fraud. Highly illegal and despicable. They need a serious fine and to be forced to give refunds to buyers. Companies do it because they generally get away with it. If they knew they'd be hit hard for it they wouldn't do it. It's as simple as that. People need to be fired and I'm not talking the salespeople but the execs that are behind this scam. And it is a scam.
Having worked at BB and CC, I can tell you that one thing odd (to me) about BB was that the right hand does not seem to know what the left is up to. I was never aware of a "secret" internal site that had different prices. I do know that each box has an intranet that usually sucked balls because it was so slow and always seemed to have "issues". Strange things like not being able to find products or just plain to able to get to anything including the time clock or the training site screwing up royally. But, as far as being trained to deceive customers by using the intranet site as opposed to the internet site, no. And BB will match their own prices without much trouble as will CC. (the post about the return policy is crap, did you bother to actually READ the big sign on the wall by any chance?, oh wait, this is /. Some products have a restocking fee, digital cameras are one, this is not unique to BB and if you are nice enough, they will wave it most times; if you are an ass, they will allow you to kiss theirs.) If there is some secret site to intentionally deceive customers, it will be a shock to me and to all of my friends that still work at BB. Flame away.
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the geeks, that is, know it. I worked for Best Buy for three years. Over that time I saw, at least once a week, four different prices for one single item. The text based intranet for inventory and store to store communications would have one price, The Internal Bestbuy.com would have another price, The printed ad would again, be priced differently and finally, the external bestbuy.com would have another price.
This wasn't a big deal, but we were never authorized to change the price unless the customer was aware of the lower price, otherwise we weren't supposed to mention it. That was our store. Other were hopefully different.
We know to do our research and look out for stuff like this, but I know most of their customers do not....and they know that too.
but remember, they aren't on commission.
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
I had to sit back and give this some thought. To me, it makes sense to have an intranet because if the online website goes down(i.e. HP monitor for $10 price mistake), how will the retail stores assist their customers during that time for product information? As for the price mis-matching, I've been told I think from a sales rep at Best Buy or some other store brand that the website is a separate business from the retail chain. I mean, I did ask this before and got denied. So for so long I've assumed things this way. There's plenty of cheaper prices online at their website but has anyone looked to see if Best Buy actually allows price matching with their website in the sales policy? If so, dang, I've missed out on a few good deals.
This story is extremely void of any actual details as to what this "other" site did. Was it Bestbyu.com - or was it some intranet site used in-store to fool consumers about higher prices? How did this work, who was involved, and HOW on earth did 2 stores cheat someone out of $150 by using this site?! I`m so confused...
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
there has to be a comment with an "i work for best buy" in here. well, i do. and it's ironic that this comes up at such a time as today. At work earlier today, I actually saved some customers several hundred dollars by ordering off of our "secret" internal intranet .com site rather than off of the regular internet. The customer in question wanted to order a laptop and have it shipped to a friend in California, and I noted that when i used our Clearwire internet terminal, the price came out to 1,049, but when i used the internal site, it matched our store savings down to 899.99. And the same with another laptop we are running on sale. I'm not sure how well the awareness of this internal site has been spread throughout the company ranks, but at my store at least, we are always up to honor a .com price, and we have non-intranet connected computers on our Verizon Wireless and Clearwire kiosks that allow us (and our customers) to verify a .com price against the internal website.
The traditional retail store's days are numbered. Soon, everything will be online only. No store-front rent to pay. Less employees to pay. Less overpriced managers to pay. Less bills to pay. Less chain of command to pass the blame onto. Less for THE CONSUMER to pay. I personally look forward to the day when there are NO more stores being built on the once beautiful farm land and woods around here. When we moved here, it was a one horse town in the middle of nowhere. Now, it's so damn full of stores and other junk, I'd rather be dead than live here another day.
I recently bought a DVD recorder... I did exactly this, and checked prices online. I wanted a specific model (Pye PY90DG) and Circuit City had it. When I got to the store, it was about $9 more. I asked the guy at the returns counter (nobody there) if they matched their online price, and he said they didn't because they were different systems (or something like that). For $9... I was just going to buy it and pay the extra, but he could see it wasn't sitting well with me. It was only $9, but the price was around $90. That is a considerable percentage! He took me over to one of their net-connected PCs, and let me order it online for in-store pickup. Then I went and took one off the shelf, walked it over to his register, and picked it up. He said they do it all the time, because their online prices are lower than the store prices quite often, and they didn't think that was very fair. I was very happy with my purchase, and would go back there for that reason.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Pay online, and do an in-store pickup.
From what we understood in our store, it was not meant to "bait and switch". We never used the intranet site because we knew it was not connected to up-to-date sale prices. Never were we told to use it to cheat customers, nor did that idea ever get mentioned.
Just giving the simple and straight-foward facts from a salesperson perspective.
Chalk one up for the good ole blackberry, I walk into these stores and see something I like. Fire up the blackberry and check the online price. If it is lower I go show it to them, hard to deny what the online price is then.
Got Code?
blah@gmail.com
I can also use:
blah+BestBuySucks@gmail.com
This works automatically. No setup is needed for gmail and many other email systems. Unfortunately, a lot of website developers think that "+" is invalid wherever it is used in an email address and will not allow such email addresses in registrations.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I just quit Best Buy exactly one week from today. This "rumor" is absolutely true. I'm not sure why they try to pull this BS, but there definitely is a REAL website (www.bestbuy.com) and an intranet version that does not display the sale prices. If you need to know any other reasons about why Best Buy sucks, feel free to check out the incredibly-named website. -kevinforgot
this happened to me a while back... i saw a good price online, but when i went to the store it was considerably higher, and when they checked on the store computers, it showed the higher price. when i asked the sales person if i could get the price i saw on the internet, they said that wasn't possible...
so, long story short, i took my laptop to the starbucks nextdoor and ordered the item from the website (for the lower price) and just selected the in-store pick up option... then i walked back in, and got it for the lower price... what a stupid system.
now is the winter of our discotheque
Just recently, I had to purchase a new TV. I picked out a Toshiba model. It had to be this certain model because it was the only one that had the right measurements to fit in my TV cabinet. Best Buy was the only store to carry it (in Oklahoma, anyway).
Went to the store, and their in-store price was $40 more than what was shown on their website. I called BS on them, so they showed it to me on their computers. I called up the family at home, and they looked it up on BestBuy.com, and sure enough, it still showed the cheaper price. After being argued with and told I was wrong, their manager just walked away from me. I asked them if I brought in a print-out of the website if they would honor the price, and he said, "Sure, whatever."
So, I go home and print out the site and take it back to the store. Keep in mind that it was a 60-mile round trip to my house from the store, which I made twice in the end. I would have just gone somewhere else, but it was the principle of the thing, and I was going to win this one. Showed them the price and they tried to dicker with me, and said they would meet me at half the difference. I basically said something to the effect of "Hell no!" except using stronger language. They eventually honored the internet price. I kept trying to figure out what their problem was, but after reading this, now I know.
Not the first time I've had problems with Best Buy. I ordered a laptop online and selected in-store pickup. They held the laptop for me, but sold it to someone else. They took $1000 from me and it was 4 days before I finally got a refund.
Unless I have no choice, I will not buy anything from Best Buy that costs more than $50.
A) The employees are oblivious that their intranet site is out of date/misleading B) They're trained by soulless managers to squeeze every penny out of the consumer as they can Not sure which is worse.
I hate sigs.
I bought a plasma TV in October when they were doing a zero-interest deal. They rang it up for the store price of $1,739, so I told them that the website was showing $1,619 as the price. The clerk went over to talk to the manager and, sure enough, they gave me the $1,619 price without protest.
A week later the print ad showed the TV at $1,499 and they happily gave me a price adjustment when I asked for one. Fun times.
I don't know if you can do this in BBY, but when I go to Circuit City, if I see an item (say 4 GB Sandisk Micro Sticks) and if the price is xx.99, I then go to one of their computers which has internet access and then go to their web store and see if its cheaper. I know it works because the store I went to (in Jacksonville, NC) had its price $45 dollars higher then the retail store. I bought it online and picked up in the store. Of course, the evil looks on the store salespeople's faces is always fun. But then they shouldn't try to rip off the customer with higher markups.
Granted, I know retail is a different animal then the internet, and profit margins are getting slimmer all the time, but I think the savy shopper is gonna look (or should look) online first and see if they can save money. Every little bit helps I think.
Regards,
MBC1977,
You cannot possibly be a Best Buy employee because you know what the difference between an intranet and the Internet is.
Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of Best Buy, so am glad someone is calling them publicly on this intranet pricing thing (potential scam).
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
We never left that behavior behind.
Each division in Best Buy functions effectively as a eparate business. bestbuy.com has to fight Best Buy stores for sales. Store advertising space on bestbuy.com is sold to the highest bidding department. In-store pickups involve commissions between .com and stores.
Stores have to spend money to drive people through their doors They'll be damned if they advertise their bestbuy.com "competitors" on in-store computer systems and let them get the sale.
So what do their competitors sites' look like from their internal network inside the store? Are they forging Circuit City's, Office Depot's, Office Max's, Staple's, ...etc sites? Or can you even see the competitors' sites from their intranet?
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
The old (for computers) addage goes: "The difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman is that a used car salesman knows when he's lying".
I imagine, as far as most of the sales people goes, this is probably the case here. I doubt most of them even knew that the prices were different.
On the other hand, I have a Yahoo! email account of the form xx2000xxx@yahoo.com and I have never received a single spam in that account whatsoever. It was registered in 2000 and used for communicating with a certain well-known online auction site.
Never received a single spam in my inbox or in my junk email folder. So I have concluded that 1) nobody's doing dictionary spamming that complex, and also 2) ebay hasn't shared their customer email list with spammers (yet).
So if you really want to be sure, register as bestbuy2007@example.com and you probably can be sure when they start spamming you that somehow, that address got onto the spammers' lists.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I've worked with Best Buy over the last two years and have never heard of such a website. We match the website if the price is lower. I'm interested to see what is found if anything. Never checked both intranet and internet site to see if there was any difference. Would not make sense to do so on each sale. Sales people are not on commission so there is no motivation to mislead the customer.
I work for a Verizon Wireless retailer.
Once had a customer come in and accuse us of selling his (physical) address information to spammers. Every time he applies for a service, he uses a different middle initial for his name, and keeps a record of what initial he used for what service. Said he used the middle initial 'K' when applying for our service, and soon starting receiving junk mail (of the snail variety) addressed to "John" K. "Doe."
As you may or may not know, customer privacy is something Verizon takes very seriously (being one of the only wireless providers that didn't hand over call records to the NSA, for instance). Every customer is automatically enrolled in the Do Not Call registry, etc.
Well, we investigated the matter, and eventually found out what happened.
The handsets we sold at the time used vendor-issued mail-in rebates, which, of course, require you to fill out and mail in a form with your name and address... and, naturally, this guy used the same middle initial for the rebate submission as he did when he established wireless service, not making a distinction between the two (can't blame him). Investigation found the vendor (or the rebate company they employed) was the one "sharing" the customer info.
We have since abandoned vendor rebates and now Verizon handles the rebates in-house.
A piece of advice: Use a unique e-mail or middle initial for any rebates you submit than you do for making a purchase or establishing service. The responsible party may not be who you think it is, nor may they be aware it's even happening.
In fact, it is very common for businesses to charge different amounts based on location, age, sex, and willingness to pay.
...) legislators to exempt and shield them.
-Many websites require you to locate yourself before presenting different prices for your area.
-DVDs are region coded, and are priced differently based where you buy them.
-Gas prices are based on what the locals are willing to pay.
-Public transportation charges lower prices for old rich people, and higher prices for the young and poor.
Sometimes it's just economics, and sometimes it's just unfair, but it's not illegal due to special intrest groups that can "convince" (kickback, bigotry,
This BS will continue until corporate officers are held criminally liable and can't just buy there way out of trouble.
It's this sort of garbage, in conjunction with atrocious service and poor prices why I buy most things, especially electronics online. I've always been wary about questionable tactics having had friends years ago working at places like CompUSA.
What I almost find more frustrating is terrible customer service. Store employees can't be bothered to show the slightest interest in serving the customer. They're often ignorant about what they're selling and many times I've seen these people lie in order to dupe someone into buying a product. What is even more absurd is when they actually try to argue with a customer who is actually well-informed.
It's really no surprise that places like CompUSA are closing and many of these stores are in disarray. Whenever I happen to go to one of these places I don't even see how they get enough business to even sustain that location.
You'd think it would be common sense to ensure that employees are informed and courteous, prices are fair and to just be honest. I just don't understand the mindset behind the people running these companies. Then they wonder why they're losing business to online retailers.
Honesty is honesty.
Reminds me of that movie, Miracle on 24th street (I think), where Santa -- the real Santa -- is employed as a Mall Santa. He sits in the mall, and kids come up and tell him what they want, and the management has given him a list of all the Macey's products that he's supposed to be pushing on the parents -- which he then ignores, and tells the parents where to find exactly what the kid wants, at the best price in town.
At first, the managers are enraged, but then they realize that they've just built up a shitload of customer loyalty. Moms are walking out with bags and bags of stuff, just because they love Macey's so much for having such a great Santa.
Now, of course, the Managers have the ulterior motive here, and Santa is pure. But does it really matter whether Santa is pure or not?
In fact, I honestly don't give a damn what's going through the salesman's head. If it actually does mean I'm getting a better deal, and if they consistently try to build brand loyalty in a way which actually benefits me, I win, whether it's out of the goodness of their hearts or because they're planning to rip me off sometime down the road.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's impossible to do business with the public and not piss people off. Even if you bend over backwards, some people are either too stupid or too big of an ass to get it. And they get on the internet and spout off about it. Satisfied people don't generally run to the computer to tell the world how great their experience was. Consequently if you go to do your "trivial" checkup about a company, any company, what you find is a stinking pile of crap. The same goes for product reviews. Read the reviews on amazon, or god help you, the feedback on ebay. 7 people think it's the greatest thing in the world and 3 people think it's an utter piece of garbage. That helps a lot. Or 700 idiotic positive feedbacks likes "A+++++++ SUPER SELLER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and 5 "No response to emails No item WORST SELLER EVER". Okay then. You are then left trying to determine which reviewers have a clue. Granted it's easy enough to filter out those who cannot grasp the purpose of the capslock key, but it seems like more often than not you're no better off than when you started.
"Oh crap. I shouldn't have said it was a website.
Oh crap! I shouldn't have said it was a secret!
Oh crap! I CERTAINLY shouldn't have said... it was ILLEGAL!"
What does this have to do with apple, itunes and drm!
- You can go shopping with friends.
- You can merchandise for quality and breakage before buying it.
- Immediacy. There are legitimate reasons for this other than stereotypical consumer-sheep-ADHD; Running out to get some cooking ingredient you ran out of, for example.
- You can ask the salesperson questions before buying (YMMV WRT QoS).
- From the store's perspective, more potential for impulse buys.
- For the paranoid among us: meatspace stores take cash.
Naw, we're going to have retail stores for quite a while yet.If that was the case, then it would be, but that's not the case, so it's not.
-Think about the cost difference between someone placing an order online themseleves, versus having an employee ring them up.
-Think about the number of customers an employee can ring up per hour, versus how many customers a webserver can ring up per hour.
Conducting bussiness online can be significantly cheaper, and saving can be passed on to the consumer willing to use a computerized interface.
You don't have to pay that price, ever.
Call the salesguy over and say, I'm interested in PRODUCTX, but not at PRICEY, your price is too expensive, I don't think it's worth that, I'm willing to pay lower PRICEZ instead, are you willing to talk about the price?
It isn't bait and switch because you're told the higher price before purchase. It might well be false advertising, but the number of companies which do that is huge. Every time you phone up and find sorry "it's sold out" it was almost certainly never on offer at that price, but they do have you on the phone and have one just like it at 10% more.
We're taught that haggling over money is bad form, well, bollocks. It's fun, and you can save 10%-20% on average on just about everything.
Deleted
I work at Best Buy. My first day, I asked my supervisor (when I accessed what I thought was BestBuy.com from our restricted terminals in-store) why the URL read "kiosk.bestbuy.com" - she said, "Gosh, I don't know. I never noticed that."
Sometimes, the prices are higher; sometimes lower. It's never been explained to me, but I think the axiom "It's much easier to ascribe to evil that which is better explained by ignorance" applies here. C'mon guys, Best Buy was voted one of the top 100 corporate citizens in the U.S.
The human world is the way that it is as a result of the sum total of all of the actions and decisions of all of the people in it, including you and me.
When normal, good people inflict injustice on other normal, good people, they frequently try to justify or rationalize their act of injustice by saying that they are "just do[ing] what they are told."
Yeah, I agree it was rude of the dude to lazily call a whole large grouping of people stupid or ignorant, but please don't try to cop out of your fair share of social responsibility for the status quo of the world in which we live. Thanks.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I doubt there is something big going on. Probably just an un-updated version on the intranet vs. the internet one. Perhaps if one would look hard enough, there will be prices that are higher on the internet and lower on the intranet one, yet people probably don't complain about that.
I am partly resposible for a website for the company I work for and when we had a lower price on our website and a customer mentioned it, we obviously changed the price and I saw to it that the person was able to get it at that price. Here in Belgium it's the law.
I also once looked at a price for a rental car. Calculated the price for 2 weeks. First price I got was about 10 times the day price. I went back and looked and then it was exactly 14 times the dayprice. I re-did it a few times and then came to the conclusion that they had two machines doing the calculations. One counted the (most likely) correct reduced price for longer periods. The other didn't.
Calling the people at the rental office did not help either, because they did not grasp the idea of the fact that giving lower daily rates for longer periods as compared to just renting one day. They just told me what the computer was feeding them. Idiots.
Well, they lost a customer and all because their system-administrator was an idiot and did not know how to syncronize things.
Also BestBuy are idiots if they use a similar, yet still different site for the customer and the store. Yes, I understand that you need some things that you do not want on the Interernet, yet use a complete different site for that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You are complaining about the fraudulent activities of Best Buy, whilst your sig contains deliberately misleading links. I know this isn't in the same league as lying to customers, but it's still a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
In 2001 eBay hired Accenture (perhaps because a certain V.P.'s husband worked there). Accenture recommended "improving" their quality assurance department by laying off 25% of the staff.
At the time, eBay was growing rapidly, was very profitable... and was struggling with QA keeping up with rapid deployment of new features.
Accenture is the "kiss of death"'!
They explain this by saying the website is another division of BestBuy and that they are actually competing in most regards. They wanted me to go home, order the item and select the "pick it up at the store" option. I said to the salesman, "I'll give YOU the sale and I'd get he same item." He seemed to NOT grasp that concept, so I bought the item at the local CompUSA, not that I'll be able to do that now. UGH!!!!!!!!
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
There is a large and growing community of Fat Admirers who love going to bed
with fat chicks. How are you going to compete against their free service?
There might be a niche market there in you if you're willing to handle the
the really ugly 1000 lbs+ totally immobile fat chicks you have to handwash
first because their care person didn't get around to it last week.
..support site that collects complaints and evidence for things like this and mail in rebate programs, facts of how they function and the motivations of those involved in these illegal bait and switch types of marketing.
One of the things I recognized about web css is that its easy to set up a quick change of a large site by just accessing a different ccs.
I'd more likely trust exposure of such by the hands of consumers and researchers outr to expose such than to rely on tax paid organizations such as the FTC that will send you a form letter stating they haven't received enough complaints to look into it (how many must be wronged and report it before they "look in to it?", and how many know to report it and where?).
What I mean by published is to have notification of even just the url of such a site mentioned within any such offer. You know, like how some nutrition supplements have to state "Statements have Not been evaluated by the food and Drug Administration" or perhaps in the form of "we give a 30 day money back gurantee" though by federal law they have to, but the way it is written make it sound like their idea (so not to hurt genuine offers).
The point is, any such offer that can be bait and switch needs to provide a consumer information link that will help suppress such wrongs, and required by law.
With wiki and blog as well as having the ability of a company to defend itself against false claims.
In other words, I find an offer, but I want to check it out. I can go to the site and see if there is any problems.
I've lost $40 in mail in rebates due to rethortic use in offer and delays on the fullfillment company part.
No more mail in rebates for me. If you think about it, what is a mail in rebate, but a chance to get screwed, as its less expensive to just discount the product at sales time rather than go thru the additional cost of mail, processing and accounting. The only reason for the addition cost of honestly doing such is for market research (but not on product cost) and mailing list creation. In comparison, trade shows, where huge sums of money are spent are for the main purpose of create customer and potential customer list.
Why is it that these consumer unfriendly reports seem to come up annually regarding Best Buys?
Best Buy sales reps do not get commission (atleast in Canada, where I've seen them advertise that fact hundreds of times). So exactly what is the motive of the sales rep to keep this secret? Its not like their making more money by cheating their customers.
"Some higher-up management flunky chose to very deliberately make the online and in-store prices different, so that people would be drawn in by lower prices."
Um, isn't slashdot always going on how the "new and improved business model" is suppose to be better? Well you got what you want and now it's sleazy. Of course they're going to be different. The problem is that this forum knows so little about business, than any explaination is going to end up wrong, or better some rant against "the man".
I don't know if anyone posted the full response but I didn't notice it.
The difference between the two sites is that one is the bestbuy website, and one is the same interface used by the kiosks. The kiosk will always give the information that is current for that store. This is not to defraud people. In fact lots of times the price in the store is cheaper than the price online, sometimes it is not. The reason the kiosks reflect the store price is because the stores get reimbursed on their revenue budget lines for purchases made in the store. This way when a product goes out of stock an employee can see if it is eligable for Customer Fullfillment where it would be able to be shipped without cost. If it cant then the next thing is selling it from the store and having it shipped to their house via the kiosk. Company policy expressly states that bestbuy.com price matches need to be done (obviously) from the bestbuy.com external page. There are two options for the bestbuy.com site that the customer service reps can use. If a customer service rep uses the wrong page because they were told to, talk to the customer service rep. If they report it to HR it can get their manager disiplined or fired for not following company policy. The other possibility is that the Customer Service reps just don't know how to access the site correctly. That is the fault of the training and the employee. There is no amazing conspiracy.
The Intranet version of the BestBuy website is well-known on the DVDTalk bargains forum.
That's because it lists the "in store" prices and there is a whole slew of anime DVDs for which the "in store" price is super-discounted compared to anywhere else, including the extranet version of the same website.
The common link seems to be that these anime dvds are either out of print or nearing out of print status. So even though the "in store" prices are really great, very few stores actually have them in stock. But, BBY's warehouse still has many of them in stock. So to exploit the situation, people have taken to using the in-store kiosks to place orders that are shipped directly from the warehouse to their home. If they were to place the same order using the BBY website from home, the cost would be 3x-4x as much.
For a while there I poked around BBY's DNS and neighboring IP numbers in the hope of finding a way to access the intranet version from the internet and thus skip the trip to the instore kiosk. I don't remember the specifics, but I think we were able to identify the ip address and name of the intranet server (somebody used an in-store system to resolve www.bestbuy.com and compared it to what it resolves to for everyone else on the regular internet), but even though it was pingable, and in the same class-c subnet as the main internet website, it would not accept connections coming in from the regular internet.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I can understand wanting to show up the 16 year old salespeople at the store that has your merchandise hostage. I can understand taking a few extra steps to get what you want for a good price too. What I cant understand is why people keep shopping at stores like CC and BB. I have had a similar version of all of these related experiences happen to me as well. The day I buy something from these crooks again will be a cold day in hell. When a company's "system" is flawed to the degree they cant offer their customers the best/promised price with no thwarting on the customers part, they dont deserve to be in business.
I might also offer some advice, never buy online at a public terminal...thats just silly.
These price differences don't just occur online either. A couple of years ago I purchased an HDTV at Best Buy. I wanted to get the best price, so I shopped around, and I decided to even look at different Best Buy stores in the area. One Best Buy store was selling it for $170 less than the Best Buy store close to me. So I asked them if they would match it. Of course not, because their "sales are different in different areas". So I drove like an hour to get to the other store, purchased the TV and drove back home. I had the TV delivered to my house, and it didn't cost any more from where I lived, because they had a warehouse close to where I lived. So of course it was delivered from the warehouse for the store where it cost $170 more.
So basically I had to drive an hour just to save $170, but according to Best Buy, nothing was any different to them than if I bought the TV at the other store.
These are my thoughts from when I worked at Best Buy (May 03 - August 04).
Quite often, we used to have no stores in the district that had a computer that a customer wanted. We would go online to get the computer, but we could get it shipped to any store or the customer, but we could never get it shipped to the store for immediate pickup (which would mean the next one that came in would be immediately given to that customer). Also, sometimes the deals would be a little different, often lower (although sometimes they would get a slightly better deal... but usually on minor products such as CD burners or something).
We basically figured that the website we went to was not the real best buy website, instead it was basically the same one set up for in store, for some special purpose. Frankly, it makes sense.
MEF
I was going to purchase a memory module for my smartphone. I had a copy of the webpage, with headers and date, with me. The price in the store was SIGNIFICANTLY higher. When the salesman rang it up and I told him that the price was wrong and showed him the page, he doubted the printout. He then went to the BestBuy site there and had "difficulties" finding the product. So, I pulled out the smartphone and brought up the website page (Cellphone internet is SOOO useful). Just as I got to the page, he "found" the page that I had printed and I got the module for the price listed on the page. Fraud, bait-and-switch, wire fraud, and a few others come to mind. Sounds like fodder for some Attorneys General to have fun with. Here again, it pays to do your homework, so, Let The Buyer Beware!!!
Chapters book store here in Canada does the exact same thing. You check the price online, and it's a heck of a lot lower than actually going into the store and buying it. They say they can't match the price because you "have to pay shipping" and that "they have to remain competitive with Amazon.ca" and how it's "a completely separate store."
It's bait and switch if you ask me.
You can file complaints with the Better Business Bureau and the State Attorney General's Office. Some companies are regulated by the Public Service Commission. When I problems with Maxtor refusing a legitimate claim I filed with all of these and was able to get my refund. Sometimes just voicing your intention of filing a complaint is enough to get your refund accepted.
To stores, rebates themselves are more helpful to the bottom line than a sale even if the consumer/customer manages to get the rebate.
This time it was:
Plus, I got told that my existing SD card wouldn't work (they've changed the standard somehow), my older NiMH batteries might not work, and I need a special "protective" case because older cases contain fabric that destroys the lens (even though the camera has an automatic lens cover).
Oh yeah, and these morons STILL claim they're not working on commission. Yeah, they just like to push all this horseshit on you out of the goodness of their hearts.
I wish we would just replace most retail with fucking vending machines. I don't need salespeople, EVER.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
like http://www.tigerdirect.com/ and others.
bazar. We are fast approaching the day when prices are partially determined by who you are.
* Print out the online price and bring it in with you.
Ahh, but wouldn't they become open to the reverse-scam then? It's not like it's difficult to save the page to your hard drive and edit the price. With the duplicitous version of their website, they wouldn't even know, provided you brought in a copy of this story about their double-dealing ways...
Of course, I have to believe they'd catch you if you did that, even so.
Yup, it's *really* easy to build an entire shadow-replica of your site on a separate set of servers and "accidentally" make sure it has only the higher prices. It's not like they were trying to bait & switch or anything.
:]
And it would be *totally* unreasonable to maintain only one website instead of two. Just like with database normalization, you want as many redundant copies of the data as possible, so that if you accidentally delete a few, you always have extra copies floating around. I mean, isn't that how everyone does their database replication? You just make extra tables in the database, like TABLE1, TABLE1_BACKUP, TABLE1_OLD, TABLE1_OLD2, and so on...
Where did I learn all this about databases, you ask? There's a great website with example code--it's called the Daily WTF
I'm not so certain you can claim "bait and switch". Say for example one store has the item cheaper than the other. It's legitimate for that to happen, and even have a store flier for that store that has it's offering price. Most online-sites aren't just advertising (fliers), but stores in their own right.
The solution to this problem is to totally eliminate Capitalism and embrace Communism. Captialism has been shown to be completely evil, cold and heartless like all xtians.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Okay, I think I have it here, there are basically two ideas:
A. Don't do business with BB at all if they aren't going to make it reasonably easy to get the advertised price. Punish the company for deceptive practices.
B. Do business with them but refuse to take the easy, more expensive way out. Go to the store that you would have purchased from otherwise to pick up the product that you had to order online. Punish the company by forcing them to honor the price they had online as well as having to invest the time/money/tracking into the online to instore pickup process.
The way I see it is that you have two completely different objectives here.
With A you are trying to harm a corporate entity by refusing to do business with it. Effectively you are taking yourself out of its target niche and hoping that it will either go out of business or change its practices (without clear numbers indicating where and how) to conform with your ethics. This is sort of like the "I don't like the candidates so I don't vote" approach.
With B you are trying to get the best possible price for a product, even if it means more effort on your part with the advantage of making it clear to the company that you are doing business with that their practice is reducing their profits. Essentially you are punishing the store (with their increased cost) for their procedures/policies/incompetence/evil and at the same time rewarding them for the part you appreciate (the attractive price.)
I think that it is clear which is more likely to influence BB. Non-customers have very little influence on the bottom line. If you really want to make a difference, it is probably a good idea to figure out how much money BB lost by not offering the service the way you think they should have and trying to get that information to senior management. It means a lot to a manager to hear "Your store policies cost you $10 in profits every time somebody like me comes in." Assuming their employees cost them $8/hr, the lease and electricity, computer hardware and equipment to manage the in store sale cost $15/hr then you consume that easily by going through the steps described by this honest consumer.
I am baffled that any of this is a surprise. These guys have always been the AOL of home electronics.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You might want to use a random email address at your domain (eg 84tk7xkq89@microsoft.com) so that you avoid dictionary attacks. The down side is that you have to maintain a table that converts random addresses to companies. So actually a better idea would be to encrypt the company names with a common key. Then you can just decrypt and bingo!
I can believe that part: they did it to me one too many times, which is why I quit shopping there. A few years ago I picked out an nice (rather expensive) cordless phone with two handsets. The thing was shrinkwrapped with official-looking stickers all over it. I took it home, opened it up, and found something that looked like it had been through a world war. Well, I figure it had been badly abused by someone's undisciplined children. Scuffed up, display cracked ... hell, one of the handsets rattled when I shook it gently. I'll never know if the phones actually worked because the base station's power supply had torn wiring. I took it right back to Best Buy and had to argue with their customer disservice personnel about how I had damaged the phones and didn't want to admit it.
... but I wonder who the next sucker was who ended up with it. Personally, I believe it should be illegal for questionable operations like Best Buy to own and operate shrinkwrap machines.
Long story short, I got my money back
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I noticed a similar thing at NAPA auto parts when I was buying parts for my 1992 Accord. A repair shop quoted me like $70 for plug wires, and when I looked at NAPA's site, it was much cheaper (like $40). So I printed their site info because of part numbers, etc and walked over there to buy the plug wires. I got the cheaper price, but noticed a "preferred customer" tag on my receipt.
My assumption here is that you get closer to the wholesale price online than you do at a brick-and-mortar. Competition online is fierce, but if you're in their store then there's not a lot of competition. So, they try to profit from this.
Anyway, I gave up on Worst Buy a looong time ago. After hearing their sales guy spew a load of shit, and seeing how their prices are much higher than most online stores, I decided I'd had enough of them.
One warning to those who still shop at Worst Buy: DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT buy cables/connectors/wires from them. They jack up the prices on those things SKY HIGH. Even lowly Target has much better prices on those items.
First off, to clarify what bait and switch is. Technically, it's advertising something (say a weekly ad, website, tv/radio commercial, whatever), then refusing to sell the item to someone and offering a different, regardless of the new item's price point. It's baiting a customer in with an ad and refusing to sell said item. If a store's out and they offer, it's not a bait 'n switch, if they offer another item, but do not refuse (refusal being blatant or sleight), it's still not bait and switch.
.com site, however, the practice I saw in my stores and trained people to do, was, price match any verifiable current ad, for anyone, .com included (the register's pricematch option even includes a .com match option by default, as well as major competitors, and an 'other fill in' field).
As for the second website, my guess is they're referring to the IntraNet version. If you log into BBY's employee toolkit and use it to goto the website instead of opening firefox or ie, you get the employee version. There are a few subtle differences. For example, when you mouse over a URL for an item or an item's pic, you get a rollover with the SKU number. You also do not get regional pricing information.
If you compare a BBY ad from New York and Cincinnati (where I live), you'll have different prices. If you look at the 'weekly ad' on the website, you punch in your zip, and you get your local ad. Otherwise, if we all click on random stereo b, that's not in the 'ad section' but just a normal click through via electronics, then audio, stereos, whatever, we get the same information, you, me, mr ny, and the employee on toolkit, except the emp gets sku numbers and information like that.
Weekly ads have a lot of disclaimer information. Limitations of rain checks, limited quantity, and even that the ad prices are only good for 'listed area'. Now while a BBY in NY MIGHT honor a Cincinnati ad (obviously our market is a bit more inexpensive on non-price locked items than NY), they are NOT obligated. Some offers are also internet only priced, advertised as such, but not in a paper ad.
I'm not sure if the store is obligated legally to price match their OWN
If anyone has any information as to whether I'm off topic and discussing a DIFFERENT web page, please let me know, as I said earlier, this would simply be my guess.
It's Real Obvious that you never did Meth and Viagra; you could do ten a day that way.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If they show it to the customer, it's no longer secret or is it?
Hi,
Chapters does this in Canada. Prices are higher on their intranet site that looks like the real website than it's online website.
I've been taking the same approach (unique email for each company) for years.
Usually it's pretty safe, but there are two who sold my email (or got hacked, etc.):
allofmp3.com
traveloasis.com
Maybe allofmp3 isn't so surprising....
But these are the only two -- other spam I get is all to email addresses that are publically available, or built on dictionary attacks. I've *never* seen another company name in there at random, by the way. The randomized attacks are usually built using possible user names (which wouldn't normally be a company name).
Here's how it works, as well as I remember. This isn't an official statement from BestBuy; it's a personal and possibly inaccurate reconstruction.
First off, internally there's an Employee Desktop program that accesses multiple functions of the BestBuy Intranet. One of these is labeled BestBuy.Com Website; management explains to employees that this is the BestBuy.com Web site. Not an internal version, but a direct link outside TO the Web site. They also don't get informed about BestBuy.com sale prices.
In all earnest, employees believe what they see. It's BestBuy.com, not the Intranet. Nobody told them any different and it's mocked up to look that way, no branding at all. We can't blame the employees here.
I believe management is aware that the site is different; a few employees figure it out but dismiss it. I don't know if anyone realizes the gross impact of this, but I'm sure they get it now. And yes customers get denied daily on this one; I used to evade it by going straight to the REAL Internet.
You're quite right about whistle blowers. I'd have called them on this if I thought it had real fraud written on it; it doesn't. It has "maybe management/corporate set up a complex, psychology-based fraud scheme using Kevin Mitnick style tactics" written all over it. That's a big "maybe" right there, who is that smart in management? (Smarts and ethics don't come in pairs, you just get lucky sometimes)
A shorter path exists, using the search function on the www.state.mn.us website, but might change. Bonus points for anyone who (using this starting point) figures out how to get (a) a full fledged IE window with address bar (b) a command prompt (c) system level privileges and/or (d) a way to reinstall the hard drive with Linux from the kiosk environment. Changing the kiosk webbrowser home to CircuitCity.com would be another nice hack in several senses of the word.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Only place in town that carries a few hardware items over-the-counter, such as USB/FW hard drive enclosures. Half-decent selection of DVDs at semi-competitive prices when on sale. Gift cards from clueless relatives. One or two pieces of interesting hardware of the non-electronic variety. Very intermittent loss-leader sales, beating out Newegg.com's rebate price without a rebate form to file. The occasional clearance price. Individual's ability to directly intimidate and terrorize normal sales staff with overt display of superhuman competence.
I think that sums up my purchases and visits over the last year. Oh, wait, there's also temporarily switching their kiosks to CircuitCity.com for the hell of it. The previous computer section manager was smart enough that on sight he would chase me out of the store; the current manager is smart enough to constantly follow me about chatting, in the hopes of learning something useful while minimizing my incidental havok. Progress, of a sort.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Best Buy has two "public" sites. One for consumers and one for "business."
The consumer site is www.bestbuy.com.
The "business" site is www.bestbuybusiness.com.
The only thing an individual consumer has to do is provide an email address and a business name and they have access to the "business" site.
I went shopping for a "Plantronics MHS123 - headset" on www.bestbuy.com. $29.99 plus shipping is quoted.
I then went to www.bestbuybusiness.com and bought the EXACT SAME PRODUCT for $17.67 plus shipping.
Draw your own conclusions...
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
I used to work at Best Buy about a year ago. The store doesn't price match online sales, even for its own site. You can however, purchase the item online from one of the store Kiosks or from home and pick up in the store. It is annoying but is done this way because the revenue from that particular sale is going to the web site. Some of that revenue goes back to the store itself based on area code or zip code from the person buying it.
They do have an inventory system that shows the number of items in stock and currently shipping to the store. The inventory doesn't keep track of sales price. You just do a price check to verify sales price. Its much quicker to verify price using the register than looking it up online. They even have store ads they keep handing as well.
Things may have changed in the last year since I was there. Last I knew, they don't price match their site. To verify the price of an item in store, you do a price check on the register or check the current sales flier.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What if the cache settings for the browsers on these machines-- probably Internet Explorer-- are simply caching old prices? The default setting is usually "automatically" which, to me-- as a web guy-- is a huge, unreliable, crappy setting. It is even possible to set it to never look for newer versions of pages, so that the browser always delivers what amounts to the first version of the page that it ever loaded.