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My dad wanted a video camera marked down from $179 to $129 only for this Friday and Saturday and the first Best Buy he went to in the afternoon had \"just sold the last one.\" So yesterday we called a different Best Buy and they had one, they held it for him and he went and picked it up. Really easy. Usually though I'm not the hugest Best Buy fan although I used to shop there a lot.
Wow. That's a great experience. My experiences at best buy have usually been positive as well. I think it does have a great deal to do with the people you are dealing with.
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Silver Reward Zone
Well, yeah. When you know someone's dropping over 2 grand a year with you, it changes your perspective
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In a world dominated by severely poor customer service, it's not hard for a single transaction to shine brighter than the thousands that suck.
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\"We hope that Best Buy finds--and keeps--more managers like this one. \"
Luckily the specific store this was said to occurred in is not mentioned. I'm sure he would certainly be let go very quickly.
Helping customer? On a Black Friday no less! Have you forgotten all your corporate managerial training?!?!
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But did they make you buy their shoddy service plan with the laptop after joking about it?
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You mean the one that cost $60 for 3 years covering any normal, legit failures, AND gives you a free replacement battery (easily ~$100 retail)?
I am not a gigantic Best Buy fan, but for every laptop I have bought there (3-4 over the years), I always bought one of their service plans and ALWAYS came out on top. Two of them never had a problem, but I broke even or better with the free battery, or THREE batteries back in the day. Of the two with issues, one was an HP that had a bad stick of ram. When I bought it, DDR2 was crazy expensive for a 2gb stick. They swaitched the ram out in front of me in 5 minutes. That, plus the battery, again, and I came out on top.
The last was an Apple Macbook pro that had the bad Nvidia graphics chipset. I took it in and they gave me a new computer, even cloning my existing hard drive to the new system for free.
And when it comes time for the new battery... more win.
So I, personally, wouldn't classify them as lousy. From what I have seen in most stories about them, and folk''s problems, it's usually due to people not reading the fine print.
\"...because the laptop rung up as $999.99...\"
\"...on a $170 item...\"
Am I missing something? Two options come to mind, one being Best Buy had a $1k laptop on sale for less than $200, or the price is just a failsafe at the POS system to deny the sale.
RSS (Retek Stock Systems), the system that controls the SKUs that BBY sells, has the ability to set prices based on times and automatically change them when a time-based trigger happens. So basically, the alarm was set, and when the date changed to Black Friday in BBY's big central system, it sent out a price-change request. Boom, done.
Best Buy started doing this last year. They would get their stock for BF a few weeks in advance, and to keep employees from buying them and coming back later to price match, they pegged the prices at $999 until BF.
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It's not just for Black Friday. They do that for anything that has a street date.
So you are able to get new apple hardware at $999 even if it will cost alot more?
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I was wondering the same thing....$999 does not a netbook make, but the $170 is more appropriate (although surprisingly low, for something functional...I would have expected $250-350).
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It's just an overly inflated price to avoid accidentally selling it prior to intended sale date.
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The untold story here is the person in line who had counted how many people were ahead of them, compared it to how many the store was supposed to have in stock, and knew that they were going to get the netbook they wanted.
Then tickets were passed out to everyone up until the person in front of them. Sorry, buddy. You waited in the cold all night for not a damned thing.
This happened to me last year. I had limited funds to buy a laptop for my girlfriend, so I camped out all night. I had a place where I would be GUARANTEED a laptop. They had some sort of deals worked out and screwed me out of it. Thanks, Best Buy!
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took the words right out of my mouth. Consumerist supporting a company that screws the little guy in favor of a customer who spends more!
Hopefully there is a follow up in a couple of months when the netbook dies, and they have to buy a new one because they did not get the PSP.
And yet, they could still (more than likely) walk into best buy, provide their receipt, and either A. send it in to get repaired or B. exchange it for a new one because they don't have parts to fix a netbook.
Good try though.
I did not know you could do that. When this happened to me on my 13-month old laptop (the inverter went bad), I had the receipt and BB asked me if I had a PSP. I said \"No\". BB said that there is nothing they can do.
So, I suspect when this netbook dies, they will be in the same boat, or has this policy changed?
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You expected the reseller to help you out 13 months later? In some cases, the reseller tells the buyer to take it up with the manufacturer if the product is defective out of the box.
On a positive note, great customer service. You don't usually hear about that and Best Buy. On another note, icky buy. Looks like a Best Buy only model. At that price this is a really good buy, but I'd be wary of the quality. Also benchmarks and industry testing has shown that Windows 7 and netbooks don't get along too well in both speed and battery life. Thanks to that worthless atom processor. If you have any problems with that thing don't hesitate to take it back... even if it was a good deal.
Watch out for store models. Especially on black Friday. You don't want to buy a model made specifically for one store or for a major sale. They are usually made cheaper so that the store still gets the same profit margin on the item.
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Jesus crap on a stick.. I'm sure you'll find crappy customer service from your favorite Internet retailer, but it just never seems to make it here. But throw in a B&M store, and it's guaranteed to generate traffic on Consumerist.com.
Yet again this week, I shopped at Best Buy and had to go to customer service to return something. Went off without a hitch. So will this generate another story.
For the record, NO, I am not a Best Buy employee. But maybe going into the store not acting like an ass probably helps when I have a problem.
I don't get it. It sounds like you're complaining about negative Best Buy stories... on a positive Best Buy story.
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Never have an issue with BB, except once when a sales rep tried to get me to buy a 50 dollar universal remote when I just needed the 5 dollar one.
You can bet that when any customer calls in, the employee is opening (Ctrl+Shift+ZZ) Employee Toolkit and Customer Contact Manager, then putting in the guy's phone number (their new phones DO have Caller ID, though the \"customer assistants\" rarely use it - the Geek Squad and managers do, though) into Customer Contact Manager.
There's a field in there that contains a number, which is from 1 to 5, five being the kind of customer they kiss ass to keep, up to and including keeping Geek Squad field agents out at their homes until 3 AM. As an ex-employee, I'm still a class 5 customer, merely because I used to buy two or three cokes a shift (for three years) from the cooler up front. The average guy is a 1 or a 2. Class 4 kicks in around $2500 spent in two years, and Class 5 is at $4,000 or so.
The more you know...
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Does this apply to the 1800BESTBUY as well? UPS lost a package with a BF netbook yesterday and the Best Buy rep on I spoke to seemed more interested in getting me off the phone than resolving any issues.
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You bought $4,000 worth of Cokes a year?? Did you have to buy a PSP on them or what?
Sounds like a great system-designed to keep 1 and 2 level customers from ever becoming 4's or 5's
Your best part of the deal was getting windows 7 instead of, what, vista? That is another story.
A $999 computer for $170? I might have even camped overnite...well, no, I guess not. Free, maybe.
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Sometimes, they actually come through for customers...
\"...this was actually the more expensive model with WIndows 7...\"
Now you're stuck with a limited OS since they only put Win7 Starter on Netbooks and you can only run three programs at a time. But I guess it was worth more.
Too bad the only reason they got excellent customer service was because they wasted over $2500 just to get the Silver status on their RewardZone account... for only one year. Best Buy sees them as profitable, thus, bending over for them in any way they can.
I, as a regular RewardZone account holder, who can only get to a Best Buy once every couple months due to the lengthy travel, wouldn't get such a privilege. Nor would I be daft enough to spend several thousand dollars just for said privileged.
I, as a 'plebe' standard RZ member, have always gotten excellent customer service at our Best Buy. As far as 'wasting' $2500, I think a big screen TV and maybe an appliance or computer or two would cover that amount. For that matter, it's cheaper to get Apple hardware at BB than an Apple Store since then you'd get the RZ credit back on it too.
I have silver status and I can tell you I didn't waste $2500 just for the privilege. I don't have that kind of money to waste. My sister decided to buy a macbook pro and decided to get it at best buy so she could finance part of it for no interest for a year (I did this previously when i bought a new TV). She didn't have a reward zone card so we ran it on mine and I promised to give her the gift card. A month latter I got a letter saying I was now a silver member. It very nice and I'll be sad to see it go when the year is up.
So yeah, you know sometimes people just have large purchase and get a nice perk. I actually thinks its very nice that best buy treats big spenders well.
I too am a regular reward zone member and I must say that Best Buy probably wouldn't give me the same treatment as they received. On the other hand this manager went way out of his way for this customer and I do think he would at least treat me decently and with respect. It makes perfect sense that Best Buy would give up $60 on an item for someone who spends enough to be a Silver member where as I wouldn't get such a deal.
The first post and the guy rips Best Buy, First, why shouldn't a company take care of those who spend the most with them? I am waiting for the next moron to say how they can buy appliances online cheaper than at Best Buy.
I can honestly see where buying a lot of appliances for a home could cost $2500, and honestly, if they had to get so many big ticket items for their home, that Silver status sounds like a nice bonus for buying all those appliances. I mean, they probably would have needed whatever they bought anyway, right? They just chose to get it all at BB, and got a little extra for doing so.
Yeah, a company tries to keep a profitable customer by employing good customer service. Shocking!
Anyway, I doubt the couple spent that money at Best Buy to buy themselves into Silver status -- that's a silly charge to make.
I doubt they went out to Best Buy with the thought \"let's earn ourselves that silver reward zone!\" They bought appliances, and if BB had a good deal on them, why not?