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.'"

Comments

Don't see how its relevant!

[SpeedyG5]

What does this have to do with apple, itunes and drm!

That's not the case

[Nymz]

It's false advertising if they claim a lower price on their website than they are actually willing to honor. If their website says those prices apply to stores and their stores say they don't that's different from simply charging differently but either saying nothing at all or saying that you charge differently.

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.