One reason I like Best Buy over most other places is because their sales people are not paid commission and therefore you don’t have them clinging to you like ticks and leeches as you walk through the store. I would be very annoyed to get a sales pitch at the checkout counter. I’d probably have too bring my angst to the attention of the store manager.
I will only be buying things from Best Buy because I have a friend that works there and gets things about 10% above cost…but my problem with them is whenever I go, it’s always horribly understocked. I will go in wanting particular things and they are always out. Bugs me.
I think I will start giving out the 90210 zipcode from now on…never thought of that before.
I do the free Entertainment Weekly thing about once a year. They tell me I get eight free issues, so I pay attention to how many come and I cancel after eight. No problem. It’s free so I can stand to pay a little attention to how many I get before I have to cancel and the magazine is interesting enough.
That must be why the one time I shopped there, for a stove, the salesman was helpful without being pushy, gave me all the time I needed, went with me to checkout and got me an extra discount because the item wasn’t, as he’d originally told me, in stock in the color I wanted, and later called me at home to alert me that there’d be a slight delay in the promised delivery date – before the delivery department itself alerted me.
I daresay part of the experience being bad or good is simply the luck of the draw in whom you get to help you.
Upon reading the OP, I was confused: how did they get your name & address to know where to send the “free” issues of EW?
Then I figured they must have gotten it from the credit or debit card you used to pay with.
So does that mean that any time I pay for anything with a credit or debit card, the store keeps track of my address?
I signed up for 8 weeks of Sports Illustrated this way. I’m at about 6 now, I’m going to cancel next week. We’ll see how it goes.
can’t you just have your credit card not pay the amount? It’s over $25, so they can do that.
It was a debit card, drawing from a bank account, and by the time he realized that the subscription money was pulled it was too late to avoid overdrafts. But yes, it is still possible with a debit card to dispute a charge.
Sorry to leave that bit out, but yes; the BB CS person was somwhat helpful, which was a minor miracle as the place seemed crazy packed. Even if his actions seemed to not have had the desired effect, he appeared to have tried.
Not at all. I double checked when the first magazine arrived.
I can only assume that they got my address from either my debit card, or from earlier the previous year when I bought a new computer (with the same debit card) and signed up for a promo free 6 mo. limited store warranty that kicked in when the manufacturer’s warranty ran out. It covered computer, monitor, & printer, and it was free, so I said what the hey, why not?
Here’s the dope on these BBY EW offers:
Cashiers are required to pitch them to every customer that comes through their line. While they don’t make any commision on them they are ‘praised’ for attaching a certain amount per shift and are somewhat hassled if they can’t attach any.
In order for a cashier to get you signed up they need you to fill out your name and address on the card, sign it and then endorse it through their register to attach your credit/debit card number to it.
If a cashier wants to boost their attachment rate they can fairly easily get your personal info off a past purchase you made that required your info (i.e. delivery, repair, extended warranty), forge your signature, and endorse it after you leave.
Of course BBY doesn’t want them to do this cause it will come back to them later in the form of a pissed off customer that could probably sue if they really wanted to not to mention it’s a bad business practice, but they kind of ask for it by putting the cashiers under pressure to attach the damn things.
So what you probably got was some dishonest part-time minimum-wage cashier trying to boost their numbers.
If they get a legitimate taker the customer is supposed to get half the brochure that tells them that after the 8 free issues they will get billed for more. If they choose to not receive additional issues they can call the noted 1-800 number to easily cancel.
So the skinny of it is you got scamed by some dishonest cashier that found the loophole to boost their numbers. Not scammed by BBY. If you ever start receiveing unsolicited issues again go to BBY, get the 1-800 number to EW and cancel immediately before they bill you. If you remember the transaction or cashier that caused this problem it would be worth your time to notify management. They’d be all too eager to get rid of that cashier.
What’re you? In league with Satan? 
Can someone please tell me what the big problem is with giving your zip code to the cashier at Best Buy? A bunch of people have voiced their disdain with the practice but I do not see the harm in them asking. Seems about as intrusive as “paper or plastic?”
Seriously - what is the problem?
I think it’s more an issue with the store you went to, not Best Buy itself. I’ve mentioned in other threads that the K-Mart here isn’t anwhere near as horrid as some have cited. I suspect it’s just the local population you’re dealing with.
There was no mention of Sports Illustrated, but up here it’s the other free offer mentioned upon check-out. I should say “sometimes mentioned” as the last 4 times I’ve gone there the cashier never mentioned it. So it isn’t a corporate thing, it’s whatever dipshit sucked off the right guy to get the general manager position that is to blame.
The cashiers here have heard “No, thank you” so often they don’t bother. The magazines are sitting there on the checkout counter with an obvious sign promoting the offer. There seems to be an implicit understanding that if we want the offer, we’ll take you up on it. If we don’t want it, anything more than a mere mention is considered rude. Rural, ignorant, hick, rube, call us what you will for living here. We have an understanding that you don’t mindlessly drone on about making a sale that won’t happen. It would be almost newsworthy here to have a cashier aggressively pushing this shit on people.
One other thing to keep in mind. Best Buy, from what I understand, is mildly associated with the magazines in that they are partnering in a promotion. Whatever the magazine publisher does is completely seperate from Best Buy as an entity. A very loose comparison would be blaming the Girl Scouts for food poisoning caused by the contracted company making the Thin Mints.
I’ll join in saying you should have contacted EW directly, only because Best Buy doesn’t have any control over what they do. But based on the circumstance, I can certainly see why you’d immediately blame BB. I’d probably have done the same.
Also, do you have a Visa debit card? Debit or credit doesn’t matter when that logo is on the card. The dispute/fraud policy applies in either instance. That’s one of the greatest things about Visa getting into the debit industy.
Finally, I’d be interested in knowing exactly how you got charged for this whole shitstorm. It would really help in letting the rest of us know what to look for in this instance. It’s good to be able to get charges and fees reversed along with refunds, but they take time. What about if you need to throw $20 of gas in your car to get to work today? The refund and reversal of fees ain’t gonna help if you have to pay the clerk at that moment. Something like this is an annoyance to many, but for a few people I can see this being a major life-fucking incident.
My mother bought my sister some DVDs she wanted for Xmas this year. She brought them home and opened them (she was slipping money inside the cases), only to find one was missing the disc! It must have been that way from the factory or whatever, because it was completely sealed.
She didn’t bother taking it back, because, as she put it, who’d believe her? She tried calling about it, and they just put her on hold for hours.
She waited on hold for hours? How much did she pay for the movie? And what movie was it?
If ever there was justification for a P2P download, I can’t think of a better case to be made for it. 
If the PM’s place had a postal code, I’d so do that.
Anyway, I hate everywhere from grocery stores to boutiques asking for my address. I used to do the “Why do you need my address or phone number?” but it just goes back and forth, and I find most of the people who staff them are a little slow or else just don’t care. Most cashiers won’t even blink when you supply them with 24 Sussex Drive as your address. If they look a little quicker on the uptake, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue works, or 221B Baker Street, or 36 Craven Street, or 7 Eccles Street. And so on.
I don’t know if it was hours-I tend to exaggerate for effect, but it was long enough that she hung up in disgust.
I don’t know how much it was, the movie was Drumline. I don’t know anything about it, my sister wanted it. She ended up just buying her another one.
Important to remember - it doesn’t matter what ZIP Code you give them, if you use a credit card, they’ve got your address. I’ve worked with a couple of retailers who say they get all of their sales information from credit card sales. Same thing with loyalty cards.
And nearly every time I go through one of those sales files for a client, you can guarantee that ZIP Code 12345 has a couple million in sales. We just delete it.
Oh, one other thing. When I looked at my address label for my 8 week free subscription, it had the expiry date. It was dated sometime in May, so my 8 week became a 6 month. I will delete it soon, and I don’t think I’ll have much problem. I saved all the paperwork from when I signed up in early Dec.
Your basic assumption should be that information goes into computers and stays there forever. If they’ve got your credit card info, they can get all kinds of information on you, and hold it for as long as they feel they have a business need for it. Like, say, sending you magazines you didn’t order.
If you really want to fuck with them, and I do, tell them 8124G.