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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 is why I use Amex exclusively and do not shop at stores that do not accept Amex. I have, unfortunately, had to use the Amex privilege several times to get merchants to cooperate. Amex has always been grand -- on one horrible purchase that a merchant refused to refund, Amex credited the charge but didn't void the transaction, so the merchant got paid. The merchant subseuquently refunded my purchase, and even after I alerted Amex that they had given me a few hundred bucks for free, the service rep told me it was all taken care of and it was my lucky day. That's pretty damn sweet considering most credit card companies are the root of all evil.
First of all, how do you prove that you didn't just stuff the box full of crap and try to exchange it so you could wind up with two drives for the price of one? It may be legitimate and the blame may be at some point in the supply chain at or before Best Buy, but how does one prove it? And how do you - as a retailer - not end up with a bunch of morons returning boxes that they've stuffed crap into, as well?
It would seem the only reasonable thing to do from this point on is to open a box and make sure your item is in there before leaving the store. That's what I intend to do after hearing enough of these stories. If you haven't left the store, then they can't put the blame on you and you can return it right there.
Best Buy has no way of knowing whether the guy is telling the truth. But it doesn't matter.
Unless they want to have their sales slowed down by every customer insisting that a salesperson open the box before the customer leaves the store... and plugging in it... and testing it... and initialling the sales receipt... which would add about half an hour to an hour's work time to every sale... they've got to believe the customer.
At least the first time.
If they've got records that show that this customer has been repeatedly returning items, each time claiming that the factory-sealed box had worthless contents, that's another matter... but one that should be handled by legal process.
There is no set of circumstances under which what Best Buy allegedly did was appropriate.
P. S.
When she was in college, my daughter once bought an item from L. L. Bean. UPS delivered it, not to my daughter, but to the front desk of the dormitory, and got an signature that wasn't my daughter's signature and that couldn't be identified. My daughter called UPS. UPS insisted there was nothing they could/would do, they'd delivered the package and got a signature. She called L. L. Bean. They said, "Oh, that's too bad, we're sorry, we'll send another one out right away." L. L. Bean made several customers for life that day.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I had a bad shrink-wrapping experience once.
Back in 1993 or so, I was not only the chief Macintosh programmer for an educational-games company, I was its only in-house programmer and also the main Mac tech support guy. That meant my working on our next game would be interrupted by answering the phone to deal with customer complaints about the last game I'd written. It sounds cruel but it may have helped inspire me to write better software :)
Anyway, I got a really puzzling complaint from one woman who was irate, and had a right to be. Our software had infected her PC with the Michaelangelo virus. She was mad enough that I had to take the call despite it not being our Mac version. It took a lot of calming-down but I was able to make her understand that it was impossible for the floppy disks to leave our warehouse with the virus because we'd shipped the exact same disks to thousands of other people and hers was our first Michaelangelo complaint. But she had taken the disks to her local PC-repair shop and they'd tested positive for Michaelangelo.
So I asked her where she'd bought them. J&B Computer World. Fine. I called up her local J&B and eventually got put through to a manager... after some prodding, it turned out they'd had a Michaelangelo outbreak at their store a month prior. Oh, and yes they did sometimes "test out" the software they resold by playing it themselves. Oh, and yes, they had a shrink-wrapping machine.
I called back our customer with the news and she said she was going to take it up with J&B. I always wished I could have listened in on that call :)
As an ex-BestBuy employee I know a little about the fraud that goes on in that store. During the brief holiday season that I worked there, Packard Bell had a promotion (if that gives you any idea how long ago this was) that you would receive a free OEM-bagged Sound Blaster card with the purchase of every system. We had a case of 100 Sound Blaster cards behind the counter that disappeared overnight.
One of the employees discovered that when you climb the ladder up to the stock area up above the shelves, there are no security cameras to keep an eye on you, so here's what you do... Get a case of printer paper and carefully slip the plastic bands off that hold the box shut. Remove the reams of paper inside and place them on the shelf for sale. Tear open hard drive boxes, sound card boxes, software packages, anything you want and toss the remnants around and pack the contents inside the now empty printer paper box until it's completely full, then replace the lid and plastic bands and carry the box down the ladder and put the box full of "paper" on the back of the shelf behind several boxes that really contain paper. Come to the store on your next day off and pull your box of "paper" from the back of the shelf and pay $19.99 for it and walk out of the store with several hundred dollars worth of gear. You got the BestBuy!
This stupid employee came over to visit my brother and told him (in front of me) how he managed to get away with it and just assumed (incorrectly) that I wouldn't mention it to my manager or the store manager the next day. The store manager told me that they suspected him but didn't know how he was doing it and after hearing how they confronted him and told him that they were giving him one last chance to return the stolen items or they would call the police. His reply was something to the effect of "go ahead, if you had any evidence you would have already called the police." And then they kept him employed!!! They did not fire him!!! He quit on his own a few weeks later when he realized that he was under constant supervision and wouldn't have an opportunity to steal again.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
"Have you seen who works in Best Buy these days?"
Do you know how their hiring process works?
A couple years ago a new Worst Buy was opening, and I thought I'd apply - looking for a mostly back-room techie job. Went to their on-line application site, answered 2 or 3 questions about my technical expertise, then spent some FORTY FIVE MINUTES on psychological profile crap - you know, "would you rather kiss your car or step on a snake?" questions. Went to their hiring office in the mall, girl looked me up and told me they would NOT be calling me for an interview.
Apparently, based on that test, I wasn't enough of a "cheerful Charlie" which FAR, FAR outweighed any tech skills I might have possessed.
Haven't bought a thing from Worst Buy since them.
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story