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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.'"
If you're worried about getting the lowest possible price, why are you shopping at best buy ANYWAY?
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.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Busch, Best Buy's spokeswoman, said the company intends to vigorously defend itself in court.
"The future of our company depends on our ability to build trusted relationships with our customers," Busch said.
Would that be with or without an extended warranty?
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"
Biggest laugh of the day: "The future of our company depends on our ability to build trusted relationships with our customers," Busch said.
I guess it's a form of trust when you trust Best Buy to always try to stick it to you.
we will end no whine before its time
Sort of a repost, no?
A few years ago, I went to Best Buy intending to buy a digital camera, only to find it cost 20% more than the price advertised on the web site. So I bought it elsewhere. I'm fine with web-only specials, but this was not identified as one.
I don't think anybody buys stuff online from big brick and mortar chains anyway. If I go to Best Buy or CompUSA's website, it's because I want something fast and I want to make sure they have what I want at a reasonable price before driving across town. Once I learned Best Buy's website does not reflect Best Buy's in-store prices, any reason I had for going there evaporated.
I went to by a monitor not that long ago for the 350 their website listed it as. So when I showed up the employees pulled up the internal website that listed it as 400. I had to go back home print out their own website that listed it as 350 in order to get the correct price, but I don't think the emplyees even knew what was going on.
To be fair to best buy though once I had the print out it took them about 15 seconds to give me the monitor for the 350, but it would have been nice if I hadn't had to have diven back home to get it for the right price.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Circuit City tried to pull that shit with me. Luckily, I was smart enough to go to their laptop/mobile wireless display and use their real website, order what I wanted for in store pickup and then watch the same sales guy who wouldn't give me the lower price walk over, pick the product up, and take it to the front desk, where I promply showed them my credit card I used for the purchase. Took a bit longer, and was absurd, but that's what you get for giving me free internet in your store.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Charging a different price isn't the problem, they just have to tell their customers that the stores do not honor the web site prices. That is not what they did. They built a complete internal web site that looked identical to their other one. When a customer said "It was advertised at $xx on the web site", Best Buy employees would look it up on the internal web site, that might or might not match.
The accusation is that the internal website had higher prices, and when a customer quoted the external website, Best Buy employees would show them the internal site and say "no, this is the advertised price on the site". They're saying that the internal site was designed to intentionally mislead and overcharge customers.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
If you find a discrepancy, file a complaint.
Although, three years ago 17" LCDs were generally priced higher across the board then they are today. OTOH, 3 years ago you could buy a 17" LCD for $300-350 or so almost anywhere online, with shipping coming in at $10-20 for ground, but many places will cover your shipping cost if you spend more than $200, so YMMV.
And so people are. Places like Costco, Sam's Club and Wal*Mart are eating Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA for lunch, so these companies have been forced to close stores and cut staff. People aren't so concerned with selection when these days when, for instance, the HP midrange notebooks and the Dell midrange notebooks aren't much different in specs or features and any price differential is essentially washed by massive volume deals that warehouse stores and retail giants like Wal*Mart are able to get.
My blog
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.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
In my several years at Circuit City, the company never operated a "intranet" version of our site. Going on any of our terminals, our customers found the start page set to the public circuitcity.com website, and were in no way prohibited (apart from websense restriction on adult-oriented content) from browsing the internet and checking prices at competitor stores, and even e-commerce outlets. You must've been in a Best Buy store.
Now, what we did have on our site were prices with a line through them saying "add to cart to view sale price," because of the BS vendors liked to pull with their "minimum advertised sale price." Same reason some items in the newspaper insert on Sunday would say "$199 before $30 instant savings."
I don't like the senior management in Circuit City, I think they've abandoned their commitment to employees and customers alike, but we need to check our facts when we go into specifics regarding an improper business practice.
This is the dupe from the 02nd of March.
l
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/03/03/0423239.shtm
Best buy already fessed up on this.
I like muppets.
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......
Online prices and selection generally match our retail stores, but may vary. Prices and offers are subject to change.
© 2003-2007 Best Buy. All rights reserved. Best Buy, BestBuy.com and the tag design are trademarks of Best Buy. For personal, noncommercial use only.
a similer disclaimer is also on their print ads... and they arent the only ones...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The service plan is actually worth it for certain expensive and frequently updated devices. I bought a third generation iPod there years ago for like $400. I spend $40 on the service plan. It died once and I took it in; they had stopped selling that model (maybe 20 gig? I don't recall) but had one at about that price point with a bigger hard drive. They couldn't fix it, so they gave me the newer model; I got an upgrade essentially for $40. Another year passed and I was having problems with this one - nothing major, but the software was messed up enough to be annoying. I took it in and explained the problem. They didn't even try to fix it; they just pulled a brand new top model 4th gen off the shelf and gave it to me. That was about a year or so ago; the ipod is still working fine but I am seriously thinking of plugging the firewire cord in the wrong way by accident and then taking it in for an upgrade again; at this point I ought to be able to get an 80 gig 5th gen ipod...
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!
I bought a printer from Bestbuy and the sales dude told me I needed to buy a USB cable. When I told him, that I had a few spare cables, he told me that I needed a special printer USB cable. I then asked him what the U in USB meant.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
"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.
Future Shop, the Canadian retailer BB just bought has been doing the same thing before BB bought them out.
... its *blocked*. Ditto Amazon.com. 10 popup windows and a command prompt pop up to execute a script to shut down the competitor's site. Seems like they forgot about Google cache... Oops! Turns out the Skyfi 3 sucked so I didn't but it. The very fact no one could honestly help me and tried to deceive me made me walk out the door and I'll never go back.
The other day, I went to FS to buy Satellite radio receiver and a home kit. FS didn't have the cheaper but good SkyFi 2 receiver I wanted. It had it on sale in the flyer but there was probably only one in the store. They say the Skyfi 3 is on sale and much better. They offer to me to use their computer to look up the product. Great! Go on newegg.com
I would recount that BB staff spent 35 minutes looking for a radio saying it was in stock, couldn't find it, offered a raincheck and never called me back. But that's another story....
One time Best Buy printed an ad to the effect of "purchase any stick of memory and receive $50 off when installed by us", only they apparently forgot to add "with the purchase of a new computer". This was a coupon that you print right from their website, complete with bar code. So essentially we'd go into a Best Buy, find the 256 meg sticks of the Kingston pc2700 memory (which rang up to $50), had them charge us for the installation fee (w/out actually having them install the memory), scan the coupon, and like magic the total came up to $0.00. This would confuse the shit out of the cashiers. After they'd get a manager over to doublecheck everything, we were free to go. I still have some of those receipts that show the $0.00 total ;).
;).
And, if that wasn't bad enough, my roommate took that same memory back to Best Buy a couple months later to return it for store credit (he had like 3 or 4 sticks of it). For some reason, the store credit value for each stick of memory was like $75 instead of the original $50 he "paid" for it. Long story short, he's now the owner of a $300 digital camera
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.
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