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."

Comments

Re:Retail theft, and not the kind you're thinking

[joekampf]

From: http://www.daveramsey.com/the_truth_about/credit_card_debt_3478.html.cfm

The Truth About Credit Card Debt Myth: Aren't there positive uses of a credit card? Like rebates and airline miles? Truth: Responsible use of a credit card does not exist. Credit card debt is a major problem in America. There is NO positive side to credit card use. You will spend more if you use credit cards. Even by paying the bills on time, you are not beating the system! But most families don't pay on time. The average family today carries $8,000 in credit card debt according to the American Bankers' Association. credit cards, credit card debtNow let's talk about the rebates. If you were using a credit card at 5%, you would have had to have spent $80,000 to get $4,000 rebates on new cars that lost $6,000 of value when you drove them off the lot. That is not a good deal! Cash vs. Credit Cards When you pay cash, you can "feel" the money leaving you. This is not true with credit cards. Flipping a credit card up on a counter registers nothing emotionally. If you use credit cards instead of cash you will spend 12-18% more. This is money you could have saved. If you "have to" use plastic, I suggest a debit card. I use them for travel and the occasional convenience of ordering something over the Internet or phone. Other than that, I use cash. Personal finance is 80% behavior. You need to cut out habits that make you spend more. You do not build wealth with credit cards. Use common sense. When you play with a multi-billion dollar industry and you think you're going to win at their game, you are naive. You cannot beat the credit card companies.

Re:It happened before

[manifoldronin]

What the hell are you talking about?! How hard is it to take a look inside of the box to make sure it's actually a harddrive? If the guy found out that there was a harddrive in the box different from what he expected, say an old one or broken one, that might've been a different story (even in that case I would still insist that BestBuy should take the responsibility to refurbish (and that's to say doing way more than just validating the content of the box) the merchandise before putting it back on the shelf).

You can track down all the people that _may_ have involved in this, but how can you be sure it was the last guy who returned it that did it? Could it have been someone working at BestBuy? So you still wouldn't have any hard evidence without actually inspecting the content of the box at the right time. And if BestBuy had a proper inspection process in place and had trained all the staff to follow it, this wouldn't have happened, and we wouldn't need RFIDs to begin with.

Re:It happened before.

[Redlazer]

In Soviet Russia, joke tells you!

-Red