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Best Buy Customer Gets Box Full of Bathroom Tiles Instead of Hard Drive
The Consumerist is reporting that a Best Buy customer recently purchased a hard drive only to discover that the box contained six ceramic bathroom tiles instead of the Western Digital drive he had expected. The rub of it is Best Buy is refusing to grant a refund or exchange for the non-existent drive. "The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens. So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive and while I was checking the contents to ensure it was a hard drive this time, the store manager came up, took the box from me and said to take it up with the manufacturer. Now to my surprise, I argued with the guy saying that they have already accepted the return and I have now purchased the new one. He said I was shit out of luck. I followed up with the manufacturer today and they said they would get the complaint to the Best Buy Purchasing department. Best Buy corporate said that they stand by their manager's decision."
This reminds me so much of the story of someone I know who back in the mid-90s had a shrink wrapping machine. He bought a CD-ROM drive from some department store, took it home, took the CD-ROM drive out. Then he took a brick and placed it back in the CD-ROM box, srinkwrapped the box and then returned it to the store like it was unopened.
Now can you imagine what the next person who bought that had to go through?
So thisb fhf could just be a case of someone trying to trick Best Buy and trying to use a grass roots campaign scam Best Buy.
If you purchased with a credit card, can't you issue a chargeback?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback
Granted it is only wikipedia, but it does list 'failure to issue a refund' as a reason for a chargeback.
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If I buy something and it doesn't work, I take it back to the store and they replace it or repair it. They can then take it up with the manufacturer, or not: I don't care. Repair is a high-stakes game, because if trading standards believe that they're doing it to delay, or that the failure was unreasonable, they vendor has a problem. SoGA protection is a movable feast, but applies for at least a year.
This isn't any different than the iPod boxes full of gravel that Target just recently got to play with. Assuming the box was brand new and not previously owned and repacked, there is probably a warehouse worker some place with a nice shiny hdd
I was a customer service manager for a Best Buy in Houston, TX for a little over a year. Best Buy Store #291 - "The PowerHouse" Galleria. This store did incredible revenue. My specialty was dealing with overtly horrible Best Buy politics on a daily basis. I sat in on numerous Geek Squad and Home Installation meetings where Management would tell the service sales people to increase their service revenue "by any means necessary." I kid you not, I saw employees express concern about the prices and methods of invoking cash from vulnerable customers, and the management would repeat itself by saying, "by any means necessary." I saw an employee charge a customer $59 to "diagnose" her computer when a CD was stuck in her CD-rom drive, when all he did was pop it out with a paper clip. I saw more horrible Best Buy policies than you could imagine, and I made a good living for a year of my life, trying to negotiate comprimises between customers who had been ripped off bluntly, and Best Buy's corporate ladder, to try and salvage any sliver of dignity that company could possibly salvage, and this speciality of mine only lasted until I'd expressed my concern to the corporate level enough that they realized it would be easier to push me out of their store than it would be to address the concerns that I brought to their attention with regard to their return, exchange, and serviec policies. Being on the inside of that place blew my mind. As for their "service plans," they use the rock-bottom dollar lowest-bidder service centers that broke as many things as they repaired, if not more. Seeing this bit on /. reminded me of the days I spent with customers who were literally crying infront of me because of how this company had wronged them. I'm not saying don't shop there - frankly I could care less and I still buy the occasional item from Best Buy out of sheer convenience, but stories like this one never surprise me, in the sense that Best Buy's business model is to make money by any means necessary.
Yup, a very good point indeed. Reading this comment thread is almost scary - nearly every single comment just assumes that Best Buy must be at fault and the guy got ripped off. Far more likely is that he's trying to scam the system. Nobody at the factory is going to swap a drive for tiles - way too easy to trace back to the individual responsible, and way too likely to guarantee discovery. If they wanted to steal a drive at the factory, they'd have taken the whole thing and not replaced it, making it harder to trace. Meanwhile, on Best Buy's part - the only way the issue could happen there is if the drive had been sold, returned without being checked, and resold. However, for one thing the guy would very clearly know he was getting a refurb (in which case he's stupid not to have even looked at it before leaving the store), and for another this story has been shown not to pan out anyway - the drive wasn't old enough to have been sold twice yet. But, ya know, don't let that get in the way of everybody's desire to have an anti big business flame-fest...
My experience with this process with the credit card companies is that it's far from an automatic "consumer wins" by a long stretch.
I've done this 3 times (visa and/or mc - no amex). One time I won by default (the vendor never replied apparently), the second time I lost (vendor disagreed) but I got my money back anyway as a courtesy from the credit card company (it was a small transaction, less than $50 I think), and the third time I lost and did not get my money back (vendor disagreed, case closed). Each time I had to document my claim to the best of ability, it took months to come to a conclusion. From what I can tell the vendor has the upper hand in those investigations, NOT the consumer.
The credit card companies say that claim resolution is handled by Visa and/or Mastercard so they don't control the outcome (but they are profusely sorry) so threatening to cancel your account has no effect either.
Bottom line, it's not a very good situation to be in.
Most likey the purchaser of the box full of tiles is a legitimate customer, who is suffering from the actions of a previous scam artist. After working in retail security for several years I have seen DVD burners returned with wooden logs inside, and iPod boxes returned with bars of soap in them. The scammer will purchase an item, remove it, place anything inside to match the weight, and seal it up as cleanly as possible. The scammer returns the box, gets their money back, and the product goes right back onto the salesfloor (without being opened and checked). It sits on the salesfloor until some unfortunate HONEST customer purchases it, and watches as their 12 year old daughter unwraps her brand new Apple iPod which turns out to be a bar of Dial soap. This honest customer then gets to deal with the headache of returning it and trying to explain what happened. In my experience, the store was always obligated to refund these mystery boxes when they get brought back because the store has zero proof of who initially swapped the merchandise out in the first place. Rather then hassle this customer (assuming he doesn't have a long suspicious history of returns like this), Best Buy should be telling their return department to be more diligent about checking items that are returned "as new". This type of scamming activity is leading many retail stores to begin requiring photo ID when returning items, and limiting how many returns can be processed per ID per year.
A while back, Small Dog Electronics shipped one of their customers an iPod box with only a bar of Irish Spring soap inside. Here's how their Customer Service department handled it:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/customer-service/no-ipod-soap-210348.php
I worked in retail for a number of years (no longer thank God/Allah/Yaweh/etc) and saw this type of thing happen a lot.
While Sega was selling the Genesis, guys would buy a complete system, take it home, remove the motherboard from the machine, reassemble it, and return it for a full refund. I would imagine that having to buy a pair of cheapo controllers, power supply, and a used copy of Sonic all for $30 beats buying the whole system for $119+ tax.
Sega, SNES, and Gameboy game carts were easily opened with tools you could buy from Parts Express. I worked at a second hand game store and we found a number of carts that had been returned had their innards pulled and replaced with "undesirable" roms like various Barbie and Jesus games.
While working at a Best Buy, we were finding that a series of open box hard drives were being returned because the capacity didn't match what was bought. 4.3GB hard drives were reporting 850MB or less, though their labels said otherwise.
72 pin and SDRAM were also being hijacked in a similar fashion. People were returning RAM saying that they had bought a 32MB stick but it was reporting only 4 or 8MB.
Then there was stuff like the aforementioned scam. We got all kinds of returns only to find bricks, tiles, rocks, and anything else you can imagine in place of radios, VCR's, speakers, etc (one CSR got stung by a guy who returned a set of "White Van" speakers in place of the Infinity's he bought). Most of my stores instituted a policy where items had to be inspected before they were accepted for returned, but they were really slow to do so with PC parts.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
But even more seriously, why should we trust the report. A box without a harddisk. What is to say the customer did not make the switch. It would be nice for Best Buy to allow a return, but how much money is lost in the process? How much cheaper could the prices be if they did not allow such returns? Again, small shops have allowed me to return such products. I wouldn't expect large shops to so do.
Digging even deeper, we see the problem. Someone bought the hard disk, replaced the contents, resealed it, and returned it. This wasn't wrong because they were not ripping off someone who could afford it. I know this happens. I have heard first stories of how people do this. They get away with it if they don't do it too often. Of course what happens is a regular joe buys the missing product, and gets screwed. Big box stores process so many returns, and have so little to lose with fraudulent returns, that they just don't check. If a customer get screwed, there are a million of others to replace that lost sale. Smaller guys do care, and do check, and will often take responsibility. Another reason not to shop there.
About the only reason to shop at Best Buy is to get a low price, or in anticipation of making a fraudulent return.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
What you are missing is that the store did in fact refund the persons money. The person then purchased a new hard drive. The store manager proceeded to commit a robbery by seizing the persons property without their permission. The property that was siezed was a hard drive. The transaction concerning the tiles was over and done with in a legal fashion.
;) ) and when I called you on it, you told me that sometimes this mistake happens, and delivered the Tower Bridge, there would be no breach of contract. Of course, if after the transaction is over, and the correct bridge has been delivered, you turned around and seize the Tower bridge from me, and told me to take it up with your corporate headquarters, you would not be in breach of contract. It would be a simple robbery. OK, not simple. It is a bridge after all, but it would still be robbery.
To use your analogy, if you showed me a picture of Tower Bridge, and delivered the London Bridge, (Yes, even though I am an America, I do understand the difference.
The issue here isn't that the store refused the return. The took the return. The real issue is that after the guy bought a real (presumably) function hard drive, the manager of the store approached the customer, and seized his property. That is robbery.
I worked briefly for Best Buy (though not in their returns department) and also for CompUSA for a bit (I know...pity the fool.)
At CompUSA we never took back *any* returns until we had verified what was in the box. On top of that, we always required a drivers license or valid photo ID. I vaguely recall returning something to Best Buy once and them requiring the same information. If they are not taking that info, they are not doing their jobs correctly.
Which, in the U.S., the way some people behave, is not necessarily surprising.
Do You Experiment?
I work in retail, in fact the customer is frequently wrong as well as loud and stupid.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The employees, at least, get paid straight time. No commission, and really no incentives.
I happen to have worked at a Best Buy in the past (briefly, mind you... my manager and I had a disagrement about the best way to serve the customers' needs - I wanted to explain things to them so they could make an informed decision, he wanted them to buy things based on purchase price).
I have no idea what management gets paid, or what their incentive plans might include. I do know that the blue-vested people you see wandering around in the aisles ignoring customers are paid not much more than minimum wage, regardless of the speed at which inventory fails to fly off the shelves.
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I don't know where you live and work, but I used to work for a major HP/Compaq VAR in the NYC area. For a while we had a major problem shipping notebook computers via a certain three-letter shipping outlet. Someone in the shipper's local transfer station was opening the boxes, taking out the laptop and accessories, replacing them with the equivalent weight in bricks, and then sealing them back up as if they were never opened. This happened on both incoming and outgoing shipments.
Commercial shrink-wrap sealers necessary to make a product look like its never been opened are not cheap in comparison to the price of a hard disk. I think it's much more likely that a store employee stole the hard disk and re-wrapped it using the store's own sealer -- which I'm sure every Best Buy has in their warehouse -- rather than the customer. On top of which, retail stores have insurance to cover big losses and figure a certain amount of theft and fraud into the mark-up on sales. Unless they have some reason to suspect this customer is a repeat offender, their treatment was very short-sighted. I doubt that this customer will ever return to Best Buy when its time to buy that $3,000 HDTV (or the $100 HDMI cable, $120 home theater power filter and all the other overpriced crap BB tries to pile on a sale). And, over time, that will cost BB more than the $100 write-off against taxes that they would have encountered.
--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]