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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.
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
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
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.
All of the spawn of AA shared a common corporate culture of sleaze. Andersen Consulting split off because the partners in the consulting side of the business didn't like paying their partners on the accounting side of the house what they were due under the terms of their operating agreements. The accountants were plently sleazy themselves (as the enron debacle demonstrates), but the consultants were willing to ignore the fact that the arthur andersen name is what got them in the door.
After seeing how AA fucked over McCaw Cellular in the mid-90's, I wouldn't let them within a hundred miles of any job I'm running.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
Pay online, and do an in-store pickup.
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 bet there's no dark plot here. You really think they could purposefully implement systems requiring dozens of staff with deliberate fraudulent intent and not have someone blow the whistle??
I bet this is nothing more than just your standard run of the mill incompetence.
I imagine they have an intranet site which has some information which is for internal use mixed with information that is meant to be the same as the online content. Due to the incompetence of those implementing these systems their intranet and extra-net sites are getting out of sync with each other.
Guess what the result is?
Every time the price difference is to the advantage of the customer there's not a peep to be heard.
As soon as the price difference is to the customer's disadvantage! All hell breaks loose, they go into the store go "WHAT ITS NOT THAT MUCH". Pissed off, they refuse to buy it, go home, check the price again... boom major shit and fan action.
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.
"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!"