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Best Buy Offers Bogus "3D Sync" Service
Token_Internet_Girl writes "Fewer than two weeks after Best Buy offered the first Full 3D HDTVs for sale in the US, its latest Sunday circular (3/21/10) promotes a Samsung 3D TV deal consisting of a 55" 3D TV, 3D capable Blu-ray player, 2 pairs of glasses, a Blu-ray movie and Geek Squad delivery and installation. The ad states the service includes TV and Blu-ray player set-up, connection to your wireless network and 'sync your 3D glasses for an amazing experience.' The package price lists the 'geek' services as a $150 value. The offer's only problem is that there is no such thing as syncing 3D glasses. They sync automatically." Here's Best Buy Corporate's response to this hilarity.
Several times. I thought that the corporate response was handled in a way as to detract blame from them, nothing more. It was still worth sharing that Best Buy as a company will try to trip up less savvy users into services they don't really need.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
Maybe, if this was an isolated incident with Best Buy. But a quick search on Best Buy, Geek Squad, and Ripoff will get quite a few hits. I'd love to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but this is a bit of a pattern with them.
The margins on selling electronics are painfully thin (ask CircuitCity). Creating a misleading "oh but that's not how we meant it" as they sell low value for the money services is a common thread for electronics retailers.
Chances are someone in the marketing department saw this and added 'syncing' of their own accord. They saw a buzzword, didn't know what they were talking about and made the ad accordingly. I doubt this was intentional fraud, and their answer sets the record straight on that. As one version of the old saying goes, "never attribute to malice that which is simple incompetence". Hopefully best buy will learn and have someone who is technically savvy review things in the future. After all who hasn't occasionally seen something like a dual core 2Ghz chip advertised as 4Ghz or a system advertised as having 1TB of memory?
Read the article not just the blurb....
"HD Guru called three Best Buy stores. After confirming each employee received training on 3D TVs and installation services, we asked them to explain the process of “syncing” the 3D glasses. We received three different but oddly similar responses.
Blue shirt one said the glasses need to be synced with the Blu-ray player. The second geek referred to the 3D glasses needing to sync to the player via the USB port within the glasses, an impossible feat as there is no USB port on the glasses. The third stated the need to acquire the glasses’ IP address to sync with the Blu-ray player. There is no IP address for 3D glasses; they have no connectivity to the Internet or network. The Samsung battery powered glasses “sync” to the 3D content wirelessly via an infra-red pulse emitted by the TV."
Best Buy has a consistent record of the same issue. How you choose to look at it is one of three things. 1. Their "experts" are worthless and don't know anything, 2. They are intentional trying to defraud consumers, or 3, they assume consumers are all retarded and wouldn't understand something explained to them in clear English. You can choose the one you want to believe. One or all of them are true.
"Great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one." -Hitler Question everything.
Here's how marketing people work...
They identify the features of a product, translate that into an advantage, then translate that into a benefit.
People buy benefits, they don't buy features (most people anyway).
So, if you have some commercial software package that zips the reports, it might go like this:
Feature: zip tool
Advantage: compress and encrypt
Benefit: Secure and quickly transmit your reports
In this case, they're trying to justify their Geek setup services:
Feature: 3d glasses delivery and setup
Advantage: not worrying about compatibility
Benefit: Sync your 3D glasses to your TV
Sure, it's not accurate, but marketing people don't always know the fine details of what they are talking about. If they did, they would be techies.
As programmers/developers/techies, we hate to deal in Benefits. They are so hard to quantify and define. We like to deal in features, which can be validated (it's there and it works, or it's not there or doesn't work).
Same deal as when Best Buy offers to take your money so the Geek Squad can install your new XBox 360 game... and this was before it was possible to install to HDD.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Best Buy does bother with training. They train their employees on how to scam you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Well, only the usual attempt to mislead that underlies most marketing. By using words that make the process sound more technical, they help convince naive buyers that they need this service. A more honest description of the services offered would probably inspire slightly fewer people to buy it. Hence, the attempt to mislead is intentional, but not especially severe.
I watched two guys install a 42" TV on a wall mount once. I'd gladly pay $150 to the store in return for their installing it and accepting all liability for its being dropped during the install process.
Every single item in the ad has an ad minimum listed next to it. Every single store has at least that many of the item on hand on Sunday morning.
There are seriously people waiting outside of many Best Buy's on Sunday morning for them to open in order to snag all of the ad product.
It's not a scam, it's vultures.
--Former Best Buy employee (with little love left for them, but even less left for FUD)
I don't think this was a deliberate attempt to defraud customers as much as it was a poor choice of verb.
"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest." -me
I think it IS a rippff after talking to Bill. Bill's a fellow a few years older than me, and is your typical computer user -- he doesn't know much about his computer at all. Well, he bought a multimedia computer from Best Buy so he could use HDMI to watch youtube on his hi-def TV (Bill's obviously got money since he drives a six month old Caddilac). After the first Windows update the sound stopped working, so he took it back to Best Buy thinking he's get it fixed under warrantee. Nope; it's a "software problem" and the warrantee doesn't cover it. He paid $130, and when he told me about it I knew exactly what had gone wrong -- Microsoft had replaced a perfectly good driver with one that didn't work at all. This isn't uncommon, and I suspect happens a lot, since the same thing happened to me when I upgraded to XP several years ago and Windows replaced a perfectly good NIC driver with a nonfunctioning one. Unlike Bill, I'm a nerd so the update didn't cost me anything but some head scratching and deductive reasoning.
I told him the next time it happens, call me and I'll save him $130. It wouldn't have taken Best Buy five minutes to replace the crap driver, and they could have just told him how to do it himself instead of taking advantage of his ignorance and defrauding him of $130. Bill's not stupid, just ignorant about computers.
Toyota owners ought to be glad their warrantee doesn't exclude software, like a computer does. But at any rate, I believe Best Buy uses the warrantee limitations to defraud their own customers. This was no mistake; they profit handsomely from this "mistake".
One last word here -- someone with money and Linux expertise could make a fortune, preloading a newbie-friendly OS like Ubantu or Mandriva on a PC and selling it with a warrantee that covers the software that comes with the computer.
There is no excuse for software to not be warranted. Best Buy is run by thieves and fraudsters; you continually hear about frauds perpetrated by Best Buy on their customers; it wasn't long ago they got caught selling returned merchandise as new, often missing items that should have been included and were marked on the box as being included (e.g., diskman-like CD players lacking headphones, TVs lacking remotes, etc).
Whoever said "you get what you pay for" never bought anything from Best Buy.
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