They run in kiosk mode, you don’t see the URL (amongst other things).
Go to Start -> Run and type
“iexplore -k www.straightdope.com”
Ctrl-W should get you out of it.
As Annie pointed out, this isn’t a consumer tax in any realistic sense of the word.
And in a free market what will happen is that if Best Buy raise its prices to cover the cost of paying this fraud settlement, then non-fraudulent competitors like Circuit City or Frye’s will be able to offer better prices and gain more customers. They will therefore be rewarded for practicing honest business principles.
It depends on the DNS server the computer is using. It might be pointing the domain name of “bestbuy.com” to the fake server. Even a network admin wouldn’t know the difference until they dug around for a minute or two (checking where DNS names pointed and checking IP’s - which would be a fairly simple process).
At first look via a browser it would seem to be the real bestbuy.com site.
I assume the “consumer tax” you speak of is a price hike? But that’s GOOD as any significant price hike seems to reduce smoking. Win-win.
I call this the Blofeld Approach- “You have failed me for the last time, and I shall now punish you by throwing a random Minion into my piranha tank as a warning!”
In this example, who is the random Minion, though? Best Buy commits fraud, Best Buy gets punished. They can choose to deal with this by losing profit directly, or by raising prices, at which point people shop elsewhere, and they lose profit.
Sure, if John commits a crime and I throw him in jail, I might end up hurting his kid, who no longer is supported by John’s income. That doesn’t make me ambivalent about jail sentences.
Daniel
But fines are supposed to punish those who commit the fraud, aren’t they? If I commit the fraud, and you pay the fine for me, how am I punished? It would be like punishing Nigerian con artists by letting them con some more people to get enough money to pay their fines.
I don’t know if BB is doing something wrong or not, at least not by having an intranet site. I just bought some stuff there a few weeks ago that was on sale at our local stores, but when I looked up on the normal site it was a lot higher. I took the flier in to make sure I got the correct price, but didn’t have a problem. That’s not to say they might not have been pulling a fast one, but then again the people could have been pulling up the wrong prices from a different part of the country.
But you’re completely missing the point that they’re not the only electronic retailers out there. They can’t jack up the prices on a lot of the things that they sell, because every other electronics store sells the exact same things, for the most part. If they do bump their computers by $20 or $50, or whatever, you buy from Circuit City, or Dell, or however keeps their prices lower because they didn’t commit fraud. Isn’t this how the free market is supposed to work?
It would be interesting if one of the “non-fraudulent competitors” would run an advertising campaign ridiculing Best Buy.
Will you settle for an online comic strip? User Friendly
Based on my dealings with them, and those of my relatives, and those of people I know socially, and those of random persons blogging and posting on the Internet, I think you can comfortably rest assured that at any given moment Best Buy is indeed doing something wrong. Purely as a matter of principle.
Sailboat
All it sounds like to me is a case of some isolated incedents where some mis-guided sales supervisors and possibly their sales managers found a way to abuse the system and attempted to use it to save their profit margins.
I doubt it’s some company wide conspiracy thought up by the people in charge to dupe consumers everywhere.
For whatever reason they have an alternative site used for training, system testing, past ad lookup, whatever, and these guys didn’t want to match a price and used the alternative site thinking they were pretty clever.
Like this wouldn’t come back to bite you in the ass within 24 hours. Just some eager sales people not looking past tommorow.
Once upon a time In saw a Gypsie lady selling flowers by the roadside. £1 each or £15 for a Dozen. Con artists everywhere!
I’m reluctant to seem to be defending a company is at least incompetant, are worst fraudulant, but can’t shops sell things for what ever they like?
In our British retail law the “contract of sale” doesn’t exist until a price is agreed upon by both parties. Until that time they can haggle up, down left and right.
If you barter a salesman down with £1000 off the price of your new car, he’s not breaking any laws. If he whacks the price up £1000 as he sees Bill Gates walk in he’s not breaking any laws either. Whatever it says on the advert on TV. It’s shitty practice and not good for business or reputation, but hey, if you want to take the hit for it, go for it!
Another issue is that the Best Buy main site has a lot of information that people in the store don’t need, which would slow down their searches–anything to do with ordering online, all of the shopping cart stuff, how to search for a store near you, finding out which store can ship stuff to you–so the stripped-down version of the website only has the stuff the sales people need so they can show things to customers in their stores.
That it does not point to the same production data as the fully-loaded site is, however, dumb; if they have it pointing to a separate database (again, so that the in-store version isn’t bogged down with unnecessary data and transfer time) that doesn’t get updated every night just like the main database is really dumb.
Also, in spite of what you might think, they don’t necessarily have the best internet access in the world from out on the floor. The kiosks are pretty heavily firewalled and, again, dumbed down to the bare essentials so that if somebody manages to get to a real browser or command prompt, they can’t do too much damage.
You are being punished as your sales go down, even if you can make back up the fine by raising prices. And, you seem to imply it’s worthless to fine any business as they can “just raise prices”. Sometimes raising prices forces a company out of business.
So what you’re saying is that you’re a thieving thief, you scoundrel.
Just kidding. I just wanted to say it first before some self-righteous asshole did. 
I think I plainly stated what I meant. Twice. If someone else pays your fine, you haven’t been fined at all. If they are to go out of business for committing fraud, it should actually hurt. Them, not their victims.
Sigh.
Okay, in the interests of fighting ignorance… what is going on is NOT that there is a “secret” site. What is going on is that the exact same website code is running on the kiosk as on the internet, but the price information is specific to the store you are standing in. If you’re in the Richfield MN store, you get the prices there. If you’re in the San Jose CA store, you get the prices there. If you’re at the “online store” (i.e., you’re not in a physical store) you get the national price.
The result is that sometimes you get a price online and then go to the store and see a different price. This is approximately as shocking as going from the Richfield MN store to the San Jose CA store and seeing different prices, which is to say “not very”.
Sometimes the price will be BETTER in the store, and remarkably enough, nobody complains about that.