Best Buy Accused of Overcharging

An anonymous reader writes "Connecticut's Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has accused Best Buy of overcharging its customers. His accusation is that customers see one price on Best Buy's website, in stores salespeople would show them a different internal site from a kiosk. Best Buy denies the charges. 'Previously, the company confirmed that store employees have access to an internal Web site that looks nearly identical to the public BestBuy.com site, but the company's policy is always to offer customers the lowest quoted price unless it's specifically identified as a deal available only to online shoppers. Jerry Farrell Jr., Connecticut's consumer protection commissioner, said the lawsuit should be a warning to companies to be more transparent in their business practices.'"

Comments

About damn time

[linzeal]

I went in to a best buy a few years ago for some laptop memory that was quoted as a 512 mb SODIMM for 90 bucks or so and stated nothing about being an online special. When I got to the store they tried to sell me first a 1 gb SODIMM than the higher quality 512 mb memory, and it took me asking a manager to get them to show me the memory I came in for which was almost 2x the price quoted online. Luckily I brought a printout or I would never have gotten the price quoted online. I thought something was fishy, and I'm glad some AG is doing something about it.

Re:About damn time

[Richard McBeef]

Luckily I brought a printout or I would never have gotten the price quoted online.

Did they verify your printout? If not, I just had a great idea...

Re:About damn time

[terrymr]

The other one I've seen is the shelves being restocked with a "sold out" product only minutes after the day-after-thanksgiving sale ended - when I asked I was told the truck had just delivered them. Note this wasn't a product that was advertised as limited to a particular number.

Re:About damn time

[sp3d2orbit]

Instead of getting the Attorney General involved, why don't people vote with their wallets and take their business elsewhere?

For example, I bought a $2200 laptop at best buy in the late 90's. "Sure I'll take the warranty", I said after the salesman promised it would cover any problems with the laptop.

Less than a year later the power input broken. I took it back to Best Buy, confident in the warrant that I had so wisely purchased.

"Sorry, we can't fix it, that's normal wear and tear. Not covered by the warranty", they told me. Offering to pay for repair didn't work; speaking to a manager didn't work; arguing didn't work. Best Buy simply would not do the work.

What should I do? "Buy a new laptop", the Best Buy rep suggested. Maybe he didn't know I spent the summer of 1997 cleaning greenhouses, in Florida, in the summer, in Florida, summer, Florida...
$2200 / minimum wage = a lot of damn greenhouses + sunstroke.

Long story short (too late), I never got the laptop fixed. Worked the next summer laying concrete to buy a desktop, off the Internet. In the last 10 years, I can safely say I have spent exactly 0 dollars and 0 cents at Best Buy.

Re:About damn time

[billcopc]

I once heard a story about an obnoxious hacker who had set up a web proxy on his personal server, that could alter certain numbers on a web page on-the-fly, or even replace it with a locally-stored version. He went to the store, configured the kiosks to use his proxy then bought himself a nice LCD monitor at a very special price. After his shopping spree was over, he returned to the store one last time, to reset the kiosks to their standard settings.

I once heard another story about a duo of hackers who had set up a fake business. They used a pay-as-you-go phone as their contact number, and a professional-looking e-commerce site. Whenever one of the guys needed to buy some electronic gadget or computer part, they'd post a crazy low sales price on their site, print the page and take it to their favorite big-box store. When customer service called the fictitious store to confirm the sale price and availability, the other guy would answer the phone. According to legend, they successfully employed this ruse for about two years until one day they were both enjoying their fancy toys when the phone rang. It was one of the employees at the big store, he was so impressed with the deals that he wanted to come to the invisible store and buy the amazing 70" plasma TV that was "on special". They gave some other dealer's address and quickly destroyed all traces of their existence, out of fear of this savvy shopper finding out about their scam.

Man, don't I ever wish I had thought of that. Now pardon me while I call my acc^H^H^Hfriend for a price check.

old

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this old? BestBuy changed their kiosks because of this a while back.

I was in BB at least 2 months ago and the in-store kiosks said in big bright yellow words "REFLECTS INSTORE PRICING ONLY"

Re:old

[buraianto]

They just pulled this crap on me a week ago. Their in-store kiosk was not labeled as in-store only. I told the worker the price I saw on the internet and he pulled me up to the kiosk and showed me "the internet price" that was $140 more; meaning he was deliberately misrepresenting the internal website as the the external site (or at least implying that they have the same prices). So I walked back to their computer section and pulled up the real internet site and pulled the guy back there to show him the price. He told me, "OK, we can match that price." Match the price??? You don't match your own price. You honor it.

Re:Hmmm...

[imamac]

Would that be with or without an extended warranty? This is a reason CompUSA went belly-up: Customers who bought extended warranties were veiwed as better customers. Those who didn't buy them were just an annoyance. I know because I used to work for them back in my college days. It was just sad. I don't think BB pushes them quite as hard as CompUSA did, though.

Re:there's a reason it's called WorstBuy

[fo0bar]

I think there's a good reason my electronics store has a banner that reads "Your best buys are always at Fry's". "Your best buys are always re-shrinkwrapped at Fry's!"

But seriously, you chose Fry's as an example as the opposite of Best Buy? Half their shelf stock is re-shrinkwrapped. And half of that isn't even labeled as such (I once bought a brand new WAP11 whose ESSID was factory-programed "KensLaptop".) If you want RAM or a CPU, you must go through an inept salesperson to print you out a cage reservation ticket, assuming you can get to him of course; there are usually 10 other people who want the same thing huddled around him. And I've never done so, but I heard their returns process is Cthulhu-level pain.

Re:Overcharging

[riff420]

It might be splitting hairs, but I find this slightly hard to believe. A cashier (known as REP1 when I worked for BB back in 1999) at the end of the day is (was? probably still is..) required to make a photo-copy of every credit card receipt at the end of their shift. This is known as sorting your 'media file'. To be honest, I don't remember exactly what we did with them. I think they all went into the same folder, anyhow. But you needed a photocopy, nonetheless. Any cashier (except for GENUINE dumbasses. with all due respect, you very well may be talking about one of those) who is going to try to pull this kind of scam isn't going to copy it all down in front of the customer, especially when they know full well that they have a infinitely better opportunity to obtain the information under far, far less supervision. I know first-hand of a former Best Buy employee doing just this. At the end of his shift, while sorting his media file, he would adjust the copymachine to produce 2 copies for everything, instead of just one. Seeing as how he wasn't bright enough to NOT steal/use credit info, he got himself arrested for, of all things, ordering TONS of shit to his OWN ADDRESS. He deserved every minute of the 9 months of inhouse arrest the judge threw at him. My condensed point is: even a BB employee dumb enough to want to copy down credit card information couldn't POSSIBLY be dumb enough to overlook the fact that they are going to be using that copy machine at the end of the day. Besides, the camera in the cash+carry office aren't monitored in real time, unlike the ones on the sales floor (granted, an idiot in a yellow bestbuy shirt is a poor excuse for theft prevention). I hope my comments/thoughts aren't as jumbled as I believe they might be. I've been awake for 24 hours straight, but I wanted to share this all for no special reason. Cheers.

Re:there's a reason it's called WorstBuy

[CthulhuDreamer]

Their collection of external hard drives is often re-shrinkwrapped customer returns. Most of them have not been erased, so there's usually a collection of mp3s and assorted files to rummage through. One may have to buy and return a few before finding a genuinely new drive, but collecting a few hundred gigabytes of music along the way makes up for some of the hassle.

Something about Blumenthal

[superbus1929]

Richard Blumenthal doesn't screw around. He's not doing this for political grandstanding or anything of that sort. He takes his job seriously, he refuses to step up to a more "prestigious" position, and he sees EVERYTHING through. I would HATE to get on his bad side, but as a Connecticut resident, I LOVE having him as our Attorney General.

Bait and switch --- wire fraud??

[AetherBurner]

I was going to go and get a 2GB microSD card for my cellphone. They were the only place in the area that had it. I saved the page URL in my cellphone browser and went to the store. It was posted at almost 2x the web price, and the page was not marked "online or web only". The salesman scanned it in and the store priced popped up. I then tried to correct him and he balked. Then I pulled up the page, on the cellphone, and showed him. He then entered a code and the web price came up. Hmmm... Then he started asking questions about how I pulled up the page on my cellphone. This gets even better, he was dressed in a white shirt, black pants and a black tie......

Corporate and Store Level, very different @BestBuy

[phildawg]

Well that pretty much says it. Yes I'm the /.'er who continually finds himself slamming the company he used to love over and over here lately... but I have decided they deserve it. Best Buy works on the entire notion of 'plausible denial'. The corporate level is the face of Best Buy and really makes Best Buy out to be one hell of an awesome company. However, Best Buy is very goal oriented... but these goals have one major flaw, it is not enough to meet or exceed a goal. Best Buy stores compete against other stores. What this means is if the worst store in the company were to hit 110% of their goals (effectively exceeding expectations right?) then that store is still considered the worse... How? Because all the stores are lined up in a ranking system and if 110% is the lowest but some other stores got on avg 125% of their goals, what the hell are you doing wrong at your store then? So what this does is drive a very common ideology at the store-level. Do whatever it takes to make sure you are in the top half of the company. At Best Buy, 25% of all stores are on the verge of having their managers and supervisors fired (which means they will try and fire the part-timers and full-timers to save their own jobs first). 26-50% range however are not having picnic's either. If they don't get their act together before the next month, they will likely be in the hot seat too. What does all this mean? It means corporate says these are our high quality customer oriented policy... but they said if you don't make these goals, we are going to fire you. Believe me, it's a lot easier to fook customers in the @$$ to make sure you win by doing shady as shit than it is to win by following the policies. But, Best Buy corporate has to know this is how their company runs... so they go on letting it happen, because as I said... it's plausible denial. BBY Corp: What do you mean people are being unknowingly signed up for MSN accounts? BBY Store Management: How the hell are you supposed to sign up 75% of all PCs sold with MSN accounts? Here's one for all your /.'s BBY Corp: GeekSquad needs to make this much money from RAM installs... BBY GeekSquad: How the hell do we get 10 ram installs in a day... Oh here's an idea, let's charge the installation fee for multiple sticks! w00t! Yes, at $29 per stick, once we had a guy go to 4GB and he had 2 512's pre-installed. It cost him 156 dollars installation fee. Best Buy R0x0rs!

"Online Only"

[XLR8DST8]

"Online Only" guarantees a sale, or attempts to. it guarantees you won't be buying it from another store or website while you still have the power to buy it somewhere else only a mouse-click away. it's more crucial that they get your attention then, as you are far less inconvenienced to go elsewhere (type compuplus.com, jr.com, newegg.com in your browser) as you are to leave the store, get back in your car, & drive to Fry's or wherever the next emporium of electronic crap is in your area, let alone put up with THEIR sales policies.

Oh, yeah...a HUGE warning.

[photomonkey]

It really blows ass that a company like Best Buy pulls shit like this, but what, exactly are they going to learn from this?

The lawyers trying the case on both sides will get filthy, filthy richer and according to the likely outcome of the likely class-action suit, anyone who shopped at a Best Buy in some geographic area between date x and date y is entitled to a free $10 gift card for store credit only.

The same monkeys that got overcharged the first time around will be those going straight to Best Buy with their $10 gift cards to use towards the purchase of something else they probably don't need, can't afford, and will be financing through Best Buy.

Yeah, I'm sure this will hurt Best Buy real bad.

In cases such as this, what the state of Fed needs to do is step in, find out who ordered and/or carried out this bait-and-switch/scam and CHARGE THEM WITH A CRIME. Like, maybe, theft, fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, etc.

Otherwise, big companies will continue to get little slaps on the wrist, and the lawyers are the only ones who will benefit.

Jail and money are the only things these guys understand, but it's often looked at in reverse from the perspective of the judicial system:

Let's say I work for Enron. I'm 30 years old, and decide to steal millions. I'll likely be out of jail in 5-15 years, in which time, assuming I hid the money properly (which is probably a safe assumption for anyone 'smart' enough to embezzle millions from a public company), the smaller pile of money will have grown into a bigger pile of money. I'll also have the time to catch up on my sleep and write my memoirs in a comfy, Fed min-security prison in Connecticut.

In cases where tons of money are actually stolen by single individuals at the corporation, punish them by TAKING THE MONEY AWAY. It's worth it for them to steal millions mid-career, because they'll still be able to enjoy it after prison.

Now look at situations where it's corporations stealing the money via false ads and fraud:

They charge everyone a few bucks extra and it quickly turns into millions. In this case, it's a team of bad apples, but likely they're not keeping the extra money. It's people acting illegally on BEHALF of the corporation. Find the ones that orchestrated it and throw them in JAIL, since there's no money to take, and they weren't even smart enough to steal for personal gain.