Best Buy Will Now Send a Salesperson To Your House To Sell You Things (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Starting next month, Best Buy will launch a free service where salespeople will come to your house to make recommendations about gadgets and services to try and sell you stuff. The service has been in testing in five markets and will be expanded to more cities around the U.S., according to the Associated Press. The Verge reports: "Best Buy has found that shoppers spend more money when at home than in store. CEO Hubert Joly says the in-house service is one way the company will open up 'latent' customer demand. Sales associates are responsible for promoting the service -- when customers ask about certain products, the salesperson will suggest an in-home visit. The topics discussed during the home visits usually involve recommendations for products and gadgets, and other services. Best Buy says the salespeople working in the in-home service receive hourly rates, or a salary, and not commissions. The company already operates a 'Geek Squad' facility, but that's a paid service that offers repairs and installations."

Comments

There is a REASON why I avoid Best Buy

[DickBreath]

And it's not because they are going to send salesmen. But that will become one more reason.

The reasons I avoid Best Buy are due to two or more slashdot stories over the years.

The first is so long ago that I'm sketchy on the details. It involved someone getting arrested for complaining to the store manager about a graphics card. The problem was clearly something the store had done, not the manufacturer. Sorry, that's not very informative. But it was when I stopped going to Best Buy. That, and the fact that any time I set foot in the door, I was instantly and continuously bombarded by and harassed by sales people.

The second is more recent, but still some time ago. Again, a slashdot story. Best Buy had an "optimization" service where you could pay $100 to have them send a kid out to your house to make sure all of your TV / audio equipment was properly set up, and to "optimize" it to ensure you were getting the best picture. To sell this service, Best Buy had two identical large screen TVs set up. Tuned to the "same" channel. But the person reporting this could clearly see that one TV was tuned to the SD channel and the other to the HD channel. Yet Best Buy, and sales people when asked, denied that was the case, or the reason why their "optimization" made the image on one TV so much better than the other TV.

Oh, yeah, I remember another reason. Again, on slashdot. It was discovered and shown that if you browsed bestbuy.com on your smartphone, while in the Best Buy store, and using the Best Buy free WiFi, that they routed you to an alternate "fake" bestbuy.com. That fake site had artificially inflated prices to be higher than the in-store prices. That way you would pay the inflated in-store price rather than go home and buy online for less.

So despite not going to Best Buy stores for more than a decade, there is now another reason that I won't ever go there. They're going to send sales people to harass people at their homes.

No thanks!