Another Best-Buy Rant.

The BBQ Pit
1

Well, you fools just lost yourselves a $1,500 dollar sale because you refused to leave well enough alone and drop the Service Contract bullshit.

My FIL was about to walk out of the place with a brand new computer package and was at the register with all the parts on the cart when the guy with the Geek badge on his shirt came over and started going heavy on him about getting a service contract. “You need to get one of these if you’re going to spend this kind of coin an a new machine, Sir.” “Would you buy a new car without a warranty?”
His answers in correct order where, “I don’t care.” and “Yes, since I’m a mechanic.”
This, after already having gone over the same song and dance with the original sales person who tried to push the service plan on him. That wasn’t good enough, they had to enlist the help of the Geek squad. The geek’s angle was that he actually fixes these things every day and he knows what can go wrong with a computer and how much it can cost to get it fixed.
“One repair can save you the cost of the service plan.”- Really? at 300 some odd bucks for a plan you’d probably have to fry the MB, the HD and maybe the memory sticks all in one lightning strike and have someone charge you 60 bucks an hour to get to $300 bucks. I doubt if any of the stuff on his machine was top-of-the-line name-brand stuff.
During one of the exchanges with the geek, I excused myself and chimed in with this gem, “I don’t mean to sound snarky, but by your own admittance, you claim that one service repair can already save you the price of the service plan. So, if you guys don’t really make money on the service plans then why do you sell them, aren’t you in this to make money?, wouldn’t you guys make lots more if the costumer came in without a service contract and had to pay time and material for the repair?, and if that’s the case then why do you guys push them so hard?” Answer included something about costumer satisfaction and corporate good faith or some such nonsense. But he continued with the pitch, making the FIL sign some agreement stating that he (FIL) refused the service contract so the geek would be off the hook if, Og forbid, someone should actually leave the store without a service contract.
Then the FIL let the guy have it, (I had to walk away at this point). “So, what you’re telling me is that I’m buying some piece of shit that’s going to break down as soon as I plug it in, Right?” “You talk about soldiered on this and that peice being the weak link and this part always crapping out, then why the hell do you guys sell this stuff if it’s shit?”

FIL leaving the the stuff on the cart and just walking away from the sale ensued.

A couple of things to note, Best-Buy;
Give up the, “We don’t work on a commission” shit already. You obviously work on a bonus, if that’s what you want to call it, for every service contract you sell, but could give a flying butt-plug about the orginal sale since it took about 45 minutes to get the boxes down off the shelves to begin with. You spent more time on the service contract horse-shit that then you spent trying to help the costomer find the correct machine and peripherals.
No, means NO, the first time.
Try not to disclose to the constomer that the stuff they’re about to purchase is shit and is pretty much guaranteed to break, therefore needing some extended service package fucking arrangement. Kindly offer the option and then drop it!
Try to hire some people that know something about computers to work in the computer department.
Don’t slide salespeople over from the appliance department to sell something they don’t even know how to turn on. (I could have given a bettrer sales pitch or ran a better Q and A then some of these guys.) Or, try to sell them third party software you don’t even know they need because it (or similar) may already be installed on the machine. Along those lines is the “Better get the Morton Antivirus Suit Package Group for only $50 because it’ll cost you way more to get a virus off your machine because as soon as you connect to the internet Viruses fight to be the first to hop down the cable and mangle your harddrive and destroy all your files and then gobble up the ethernet cable so you can’t get any patch or fixes off the internet.”
Give it a rest all-fuckin-ready. I am convinced that you guys loose money on computers but make it up in selling Ink and Service plans and Software.
Heh, I mention ink but I won’t go into how the FREE Z715 Lexmark printer ($70 on the shelf) costs about that much just to replace the ink cartridges $26, and $42.
And you only get a ‘starter’ ink cartridge, of course.

Circuit City doesn’t seem to have these problems and now they’re $1,500 dollars richer, assholes.

2

Believe it or not when it comes to the advertised computer package specials BestBuy prefers to not sell them to people who don’t want the warrantty/cables/ink cartidges.
When the package sells for $1500, and BBY bought it for $1500, and they only get 15 packages to sell for the week, it’s in their best interest to push those 15 machines out the door with some goodies on them to make some money.

They didn’t “lose a $1500 sale”, they just gave themselves another opportunity to sell it to someone else who may buy all the extra crap.

(Commisions and bonuses on selling those warranties? No. Preferable work hours and promises of promotions for selling them? Yes.)

3

I believe that.

Also true, but they lost a repeat costumer for something else besides a computer now.

A non-monetary bonus, but a bonus still.

Another thing, Mr. Geek tried to imply that a brand new $36 dollar surge protector was needed because the two year old one that the FIL currently was using was no good.

4

I got the came kind of pressure when I bought my son a laptop at CompUSA. The floor sale assistant actually got pissed and snarky when I told her very politely that I would not be buying the extended warranty and was steadfast in my decision.

At the register another assistant talked for five minutes and went to get the manager when I said NO. The manager came out and talked for a few minutes and then said in a condescending tone, “I hope you realize what you just did by passing up the opportunity to buy the warranty”. I said, “Yes, I now realize that you won’t make any profit unless you sell the warranty on this $750 laptop.”

You just gotta wonder why somebody would pay $150 to insure a $750 item.

5

No-one disagrees that it’s in their best financial interest to push the extras, but i have a hard time believing that they make no profit at all on a $1500 computer package. Do you have any evidence for that?

6

Maybe, but they most definitely lost any future business from the Sense family. Multiply this by the rest of the customers who have been turned off by BestBuy’s high pressure warranty sell. Not a good approach, unless the business plan consists of targeting the segment of humanity that purchases extended warranties.

I fired off a very angry email to BestBuy just this past Friday. The email explains the source of my rage very clearly, I think.

Ahem…

By the way, as a sort of “baseline”, I checked target.com and they take gift cards at their website. What the hell is BestBuy’s major malfunction?

7

Obviously, BestBuy doesn’t encourage e-commerce, because that doesn’t give them the opportunity to harangue you about the extended warranty on your CD before actually ringing it up.

8

This is not true, unless something has changed in the past year or so. When I worked at Best Buy, we did NOT work on comission, not did we get any bonuses for service contracts.

But we did get chewed out when we didn’t sell them.

9

On the small end of the paybacks spectrum:

I went into Best Buy a few days ago, looking for a game called Max Payne 2. I found the last copy on the shelf and noted the price tag said $49.99. Normally, I don’t buy games unless they have come down in price, but I was desparate for entertainment.

They rang it up and I signed the charge slip without really looking at it (didn’t have my reading glasses with me), and I took it out to the car. Putting on my car glasses, I realized with a shock that the item had rung up for $9.99.

Now, I consider myself more honest than most when it comes to accidental undercharges and being given too much change for an item, but this is Best Buy, warranty pimps of America. I’m not suffering any guilt whatsoever on this one.

10

Well, being a previous manager there for years I had access to “cost” for all the items we sold. Whether this reflected an actual “cost” paid by BBY to the vendor I don’t know since I’m sure a lot of wheeling and dealing is done by buyers to get discounts.
One of the ways we saw evidence of this was though employee purchases.
When an employee makes a purchase the system calculates “cost + 5%” for what the employee will pay. Often, employees were confused when (for example) they rang up the advertised $1500 computer, applied the discount (cost+5) and it said they owed $1600. Calculate it out and the units “cost” was roughly $1523.
We had to tell them “hey, your better off paying the advertised price.”

Having worked there for so long I have an idea of what kind of margins different items have. Sell an RCA 27" TV for $200 and they make about $6. Sell a Monster Cable surge protector for $150 and they make $75.

11

Max Payne 2 was released a year ago. I bet they simply forgot to update the price tag to match the computer. No one charges 50$ for year-old games, not even big hits like Diablo.

12

Yeah, screw that…

Warranties are good on laptops, I think, because they are more expensive to fix, but desktops are always stationary, so they are less likely to break. Plus 300 dollars? Two years ago, I bought a top-end motherboard, processor (an Atholon 2700 XP two years ago) graphics card and a gig of memory for 700 dollars. I doubt your FIL is buying the gaming machine that I was, so I would gather that these components would cost him around 300 dollars. That’s a lot of stuff to break. Not to mention that the system I have is more than ample enough to even play games still, and would probably be cheaper than that 300 dollars I mentioned. CRTs are unlikely to break. Honestly, unless your FIL was buying a very fast machine, I don’t see how it could cost so much to begin with. But who knows?

Apple is a little bad on the warranty pimping. I bought my Mac mini there, and they tried to pimp me their apple care, but it already comes with a one-year warranty, so they opperate from a weaker position. Hell, I figure that if nothing breaks in the first year then the hardware is good enough to make it further. And really, it doesn’t include my monitor. But it was only 149 which is about what you could expect for a 500 dollar computer. But support? Who needs it… I can fix my own stuff and Apple’s boards would provide any amount of info that I could provide. My DVD player is third party, and if my HDD breaks I’ll buy a better one. But the motherboard is my only problem. I doubt it will break.

But screw BB and their geek squad. That’s an insane amount to pay for a desktop, because there’s no piece of hardware there that should cost more than 150 dollars and if two pieces break, then its a POS to begin with. This thing just has lame written all over it.

I don’t know how good your computer skills are but I wish I could have given you advice beforehand, because it is easier, a lot of times to just build your own stuff.

This isn’t easy and isn’t always cheaper, but you get the most standard parts, which are most likely to work together. You don’t have to worry about proprietary motherboards or whatever. I saw my friend (who fixes computers as a job) deal with some crazy LCD unit that had a computer built in the back with a TV card and some such. It was a huge pain to deal with and makes the whole process harder.

13

Man, do I hate Best Buy’s customer service. From the lack of assistance on the floor to the pressure to buy the shitty extended warranty to their dishonesty and awful service the one time I went with a friend to have her computer under warranty actually serviced (they first tried to get her to take a replacement which was far inferior to the one she’d purchased, then they took six weeks to replace a power supply), they truly suck the proverbial root.

My favorite warranty story was when I was with someone buying cheapass computer speakers. I think they cost like $10. Joe Blueshirt asked us if we’d like the extended warranty, which cost $20. We stared at him in amazement while he said, without a trace of shame in his voice, “you know, you blow these things out twice and you’ve paid for the warranty right there!”

They suck.

14

I used to provide phone support for people who bought Circuit City’s extended warranty. They can be bad about pushing the warranties on people as well, I’ve had hundreds, probably thousands, of callers who were told by the CC salesperson that the warranty covered all kinds of things that were specifically excluded from the contract. It wasn’t always deliberate lies, some of them obviously believed it because we’d get them calling on the customer’s behalf after we denied service to argue with us about what was covered.

I agree that laptops are probably the only thing it would make sense to buy an extended warranty for, because repairs can be very expensive. Most of the laptop problems people called about were not covered under warranty, though - loose DC port, cracked hinges, bad pixels in the screen (only covered if the effected area is larger than a dime), battery not holding a charge, etc. Even if we did approve depot repair, usually the repair depot found some reason to deny service once they actually had their laptop opened up.

What I think is worst about the Circuit City extended warranty is that they started wanting us to transfer a certain percentage of people who called for technical support to the sales line. Officially, this was for if the customer needed to buy a consumer-replaceable part for us to finish our troubleshooting (i.e. ink cartridges), or if the problem was not covered but a replacement was cheap, or if the customer mentioned during the course of the call that they were interested in purchasing something that might be had at Circuit City. We were required to transfer 10% of our calls, though, which was impossible unless you started trying to hard-sell the customer on buying something. The most common trick was to check the customer’s startup group for spyware, and if you saw any (and most people do have some spyware on their system), tell the customer that they HAD to get rid of the spyware before we could fix their problem and transfer them to buy some. Another ‘good’ trick was to try and convince the customer they needed to buy new antivirus software, even if they already had some on their system. When I didn’t go this route and had problems making the quota, they had their top salespeople sit with me, and tell me things like ‘Older customers are the best because they’ll believe anything you tell them and they are afraid of doing something wrong to their computer’.

I don’t work there anymore.

15

Try Laser Monks They have some really great ink cartridge prices, one of my guildmates told me about these guys. I pay 5 bucks each for my ink cartridges as opposed to the 12 each they normally cost at Best Buy, and looking up the ink cartridges for the Lexmark Z715 you mentioned, says your black cartridge would cost 21.95 for the black cartridge and 22.95 for the color as opposed to 26 and 42).

They really are Cistercian Order monks, so the majority of their profits goes to charitable works. You can save money some really good money and and know most of your money is actually going to a good cause instead of a CEO’s wallet, can’t beat that.

As far as Best Buy goes, I build my own computers, and wouldn’t consider buying those type things from them, but I’ll still buy little stuff like PC games or DVDs. Depending on exactly what it is, I’ve been known to buy the warranties.

In the case of my 200 dollar Canon printer it was definitely worth it, I replaced the thing literally almost every 6 months over the 3 year warranty. Every. Six. Months. This thing would break down, I’d take it in to Best Buy and they’d just tell me to pick out any printer worth that amount of money.

shrug I have no idea how a company can actually make money like that but it certainly worked for me. If it’s something I see a good chance of breaking over a 3 year period, I’ll buy a warranty, but it would really piss me off to be pressured into it.

16

Bwa ha ha ha.

The most absurd offer I’ve ever gotten was a $40 DVD player on which Circuit City wanted to sell me a warranty for $15. I told them that in a year, I could buy a new DVD player for $15.

17

Radio Shack: I buy a $16.95 pair of headphones. The one year warranty? $15!

18

I once bought a VCR, not at best buy. They tried to sell me a service plan on the thing. It actually cost more than the VCR did. I don’t remember exactly how much more, but how stupid can you be?

19

I bought a floor model DVD player this Christmas for my boyfriend, and added a universal remote to the bill.

Oddly, I didn’t hear a whisper about an extended warranty for the DVD player. But I did get the spiel of an extended warranty for the remote, and it would cost only $5, for this remote I’m paying $7 for.

Uh. No.

20

Damn…

Monks???

Wow!

I mean really… Its amazing, but I am constantly, pleasantly surprised by monks. I mean they are always doing charitable works, but never in a “holier than thou” kind of way. I mean first they are responsible for Franziskaner Weizenbier, and now cheapo inkjet replacements. These guys really do have good hearts. Okay “The Name of the Rose” aside.

Okay, I don’t want to be an Apple pimp, but the deal with them is that they seem to make enough profit on the hardware to enable them to offer support as…well, support. Of course it costs money, but its not like they pimp it that hard. I got the pitch, but I easily deflected it by saying that I could just order Applecare in a year when my warranty was over. They agreed with me that there was pratically no reason to order it if I knew what I was doing other than the fact that I may forget. To me, it seemed as if there was some pressure to push Applecare, but they weren’t really pushing it. And they could have really pushed for more. i bought the mini, and I didn’t hear a pitch for Office, or anything else, they let me make my purchase and leave like I wanted to. They didn’t even ask if I wanted a monitor! While this should be the norm, in light of the Best Buy nightmare, its seemed downright magnanamous. Imagine! someone that knew exactly what he wanted without being harassed to buy Airport, Bluetooth, etc.

Although… if he had asked me if I wanted to throw in a 30" cinema display I might have caved :smiley:

If you guys haven’t seen this thing… Wow… Its amazing. Its like a big-screen tv except its an LCD screen. I couldn’t even comprehend its size. Too cool.