RickJay, check out this thread…
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=140176
I have had hit and miss success getting links to work but there it is.
I have to admit that Best Buy must have had a corporate level change of heart. I’ve been in three different Best Buys this last month and they all had salespeople leap on you. They also seemed to know what they were talking about.
To have that happen at three different stores must mean they are trying to clean up their act…
wth???
I give up. Why does it put … in there?
Nevermind. It works. Hey, I’m new and stupid…
Actually-they understaff on purpose to save money. It’s a common practice in the retail industry, believe it or not.
What do they care, as long as they’re making a profit?
Echo wrote:
Bravo to you and Mr. Echo!
We’ve had our share of problems with Best Buy too. We bought a DVD player in June 2001. We got the 4 year extended warranty with it too… cost us $50. With the service agreement we can take the DVD player in to be cleaned for free so we did. They called us a couple days after we dropped it off and told us that our DVD player was broken beyond repair and they would give us a new one of equal value… we just have to come pick out which one we want. How it got broken I’ll never know because there was absolutely nothing wrong with it when we brought it in. I really think someone dropped it or something.
They tell us to bring the cords and remote with us… sure, no problem. After making the 45 minute drive to Best Buy we tell the guy at the service counter what we’re there for and show him our receipts and hand over the cords and remote. He then asks us if we brought the User’s Manual with us. “No, we were only told to bring the cords and remotes.”
“Well,” he says, “We’ll have to charge you $5 for not having the manual but if you bring the manual in at a later time we’ll give you your $5 back.”
“So we’re supposed to drive 45 minutes back home to get a book and another 45 minutes back here so we can get our $5 back? I don’t think so.”
Anyway… we go back to pick out the DVD player that we want… they don’t have anymore. The sales guy says that they’re getting a new shipment of them in Thursday night and we can come pick it up Friday. He said to call first and make sure they still had some in stock since we we’re driving a long way to get there.
So we leave without a new DVD player and wait until Friday to go back. My husband called Best Buy at 3:30 that Friday afternoon and was told that they had several still in stock and they would hold one for us. He called them at 4:30 when we were driving there to confirm that they did indeed have one for us… no one knew that one was supposed to be held for us. We talked to two different salespeople and finally a manger over the phone for 30 minutes before they finally found it! We picked it up, got the hell outta there and vowed to never go back again!!
SIMBestBuyEmployee!
EchoKitty
How was the calculator package sealed?
Beneath me? Huh? I’m not talking about class issues. This is business.
I don’t! I’m just the professor of economic slack!
Your assumptions are bad. People who can expect good service are those who can afford to pay other people to do their shopping for them. Nobody else is rich enough. If you don’t like it, you’re welcome to try and get a different job. Sucks to be poor, doesn’t it?
We think as one! But as you know, that takes effort, and is not guaranteed to work and is most certainly unlikely to net more pay. It’s not as if years of retail experience doubles your salary when you switch to a new retail position or anything, unlike those jobs where you sit at a desk and surf the net all day. It’s easier to just be as lazy as you can.
Who said it was intolerable? It’s fun! Some customer who stepped on a homeless guy on the way in has a coronary because they can’t have shiny consumer electronics right now, and tries to get you fired because you don’t care! Too bad I’m sleeping with that manager!
Anyway, you can assume these people have already quit the truly intolerable jobs, and are staying because this job is the most tolerable. It’s like a Laffer curve about not overtaxing yourself instead of tax! This is Reaganomics in action, baby!
But I see you’re getting me on one point… you already have the attitude down, the Gordon Gekko “I don’t give half a fuck about anything except my CDs and TVs” thing. Well… the retail employees feel the same way about you! None of us have power over Best Buy management practices! We’re all just looking to buy a lot of CDs, it is what unites us!
What is this “sticking it to The Man” crap? Who said anyone was complaining? The system fucking rocks! I’m talking straight up capitalism. The pay is inelastic, employee effort is not. So the value of pay is increased when you do less work for the same amount of it.
Hey, my comments weren’t for the edification of retail employees, they already know this. Duh. The trick is being lazy without getting fired, and even with insane customers who try and make it into some kind of moral issue when they get bad service there is still a huge variation in the amount of effort you can put forth for wage X. Truly gifted retail employees can piss off customers all day and not get fired. And that is an extremely marketable skill.
-fh
I have held fast to my pledge to never again set foot in the Evil Store Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken. It’s been 18+ months since they lost my computer (they did replace it after much bitching and moaning). I don’t even like going to Office Depot because it’s in the same shopping center and I have to look at the Evil One’s facade.
I also have not been to the Other Evil Store Whose Name Shall Also Not Be Spoken (CC for short) since they lied about not selling Playstation 2s.
Any future electronic purchases will have to done through any place else. Even Media Play, if neccessary.
hazel-rah is cool.
I’m sorry, but I seriously doubt anyone is lying when they tell you this. The corporate goons that say “you can have this many hours to spend on payroll” are not in the store and could not give one less rat’s ass whether or not we are or are not understaffed. They are actually cutting our payroll only a few weeks before Giftmas. So please don’t act like it’s just the employee trying to make excuses. It may be some of the time, but certainly not all of it.
The best thing to do, if you want to save your blood pressure or time, is if you know you’ll need assistance beyond being checked out, to just try to shop at a non-peak time. I like helping customesr, and unlike **
hazel-rah**, I actually try to do more than the minimum possible amount of work, but I can’t personally help three or four people at one time (not for want of trying though.)
And what sucks is that I actually get stopped by customers and HELP them, not just point them in a direction and walk off, and now my supervisors are bitching at me because I’m not meeting quotas back in my frame shop for the hours I’m scheduled. Because if I get called out to the floor to help someone, I actually help them. I stay with them until they find exactly what they need, then I ring it up for them if everyone else is busy. And I explained this, and my management doesn’t care. And they’re threatening to write me up/take disciplinary action for it (not meeting minimum standards). Screw that.
I’m leaving this job right after new year’s anyway. I had originally planned to come back and work part-time there, but I may just get a regular sales job at the mall instead until I can find some kind of office work. It’s less stressful, I get to move around more, and the customers are much more appreciative of me being helpful than the idiot management is – at my job they care about only one thing – our sales margin and their own bonuses.
I should probably add that I have more comment cards from happy customers mailed in about me than probably most of the other employees combined. And I’m going to have lots of regulars asking where I am after I’m gone. 
::applaudes:: I think every one should be forced to work in a min. wage customer service job for a year. You’ll be a lot nicer to employees once you realize some of the stuff they have to go through.
My parents had this nifty idea that I should pay for my own college, and I’ve been working ever since it was legal for me to.
Now, I have encounted a lot of rude, incompetent salespeople, but for every once of those I’ve encountered, I’ve had the misfortune of coming across 5 bitchy customers. People biatch about:
-the prices (like I set them)
-acts of God (when I worked at an amusement park, they would come to me, a seller of food and complain about the rain)
-things that are totally not in your department (at amusement park they would also biatch about rides not being open. like i could go run them)
-things they should have put into consideration (if you have to see a movie in 10 minutes, don’t order a full dinner!)
-lack of insane amount of options. (i can see people complaining that we don’t have soy milk, but as a French Bakery, when we say we don’t have sourdough bread, WE DON’T HAVE IT!)
-us having lives (people who DEMAND to enter the store, although we have clearly been closed for quite some time now.)
-not believing their lies (i’m sorry, i know for a FACT that you did not enter the store with that sweater that has the tags still on it)
-us not having super powers (don’t come into our resturant during the middle of our rush hours and expect to get your food in 10 mins)
I could go on and on with this list, but I wouldn’t want to bore you. 
It’s annoying when you go to a computer store and no one there knows anything about computers, or when you do come across those rude employees. But, go talk to someone in customer service/management about it! And leave appraisals for the workers who work extra hard to help you.
I’ve also gotten biatched for taking time out to help a customer find an item. (even though usually the item they are looking for isn’t in my department). It’s the management who is counterproductive to helping customers. I won’t tell you the number of times I’ve just been pushed out into a totally new environment and expected to learn everything just as I go. As you can imagine, I have no idea of the answers to some of the most basic company questions the costumers ask, because I haven’t been fully informed.
But, if you expect excellent service everywhere, expect to pay higher prices. One of the reasons why the resturant where I am currently working can afford to keep their prices so low, is all the mexican workers (who can’t speak good english, if any at all) they staff in the kitchen.
I’ve had the frustration of walking into a computer store and knowing more about computers than any of the employees currently working there, but that is why I no longer shop at such places and instead, when I bought my digital camera, I went to a store where I knew I could get excellent service.
After working for many years in low paying, retail and customer service positions, I am always really nice to the employees. I’ve found that by treating them nicely and with respect, they will do the same for you.
I tried to buy a TV at Best Buy just a week ago. But I don’t like ranting and raving to managers, so after I felt like I’d had enough abuse, I walked out of the store and bought a TV from someone else.
Maybe these aren’t really Best Buy sales personnel. Maybe Circuit City buys blue golf shirts for their employees and encourages them to wander around in Best Buy on their days off. “Yeah, just pretend you work there. Tell people that you’re going to get a ladder and then just stand there in front of them! Tell them that you’ll have someone bring their TV out of the back, then interrupt them in mid-sentence to talk to another customer about rabbit ears or something. Do everything you can to piss people off.”
That’s my theory. Evil saboteurs from the competition. Either that, or they really are Best Buy employees, but they hate working there so much that they’re trying to kill BB with bad service. Either way, they’re definitely evil.
My adventures at Best buy
different board, same store
I used to work for Best Buy, and I’ll state right now one reason why you might get poor service: the company tends to treat its salespeople like shit.
I worked in the video department, and I’ve seen hundreds of customers get the same treatment as you. Standard number of employees for Mon-Thurs is 2 in the morning, 3 in the afternoon, 2 at night, while for the weekends there might be upwards of 5 employees during the day. Video (or home theater, depending on what style Best Buy it is) is one of the largest and busiest departments in the store, usually only behind Computers. Most other departments have 1, maybe 2 employees throughout the day. There are usually 2-4 managers in the morning, 3 in the afternoon, and 2 at night.
With the amount of traffic that came through the store I worked in, it’s impossible to help every person out. The problem gets compounded even more if even one person calls in sick. Weekends are absolutely terribly crowded. It totally matters when you go to the store. Too many people go into stores during rush hour and expect to get awesome service.
Now, go into a store on a wednesday morning, I bet you won’t have ANY problems getting service (unless it’s holiday time or someone called in sick). After that is all based on luck, since Employees are required to take their lunch before their fifth hour of working (at least in the US), and it becomes much busier.
Now, next thing: Best Buy can not sell display models UNLESS it is a clearance item and they have no more new ones in stock. It does not matter if a regular floor person tells you otherwise.
Best Buy does use a computerized inventory system, however, it is only updated every morning. So, if something sells out during the day, there is no way to tell without looking at the topstock and the backstock room (which, by the way, I would NOT recommend following an employee there, as it is criminal trespass).
All in all, RickJay, the way you describe your bad experience makes you seem like one of the rude, jackass customers who make too many pushy demands on an under-paid, under-appreciated salesguy, the kind of customer I always hated having to deal with.
Oh, and DDG: I like you and all, but…
This actually kinda/sorta insulted me, because you included me in that gross generalization. I really enjoyed working there until the change to terrible management, but I still feel this included me.
“Can you show me where the TV antennas are?” “Excuse me, I asked someone to get me a vcr, where is it?” “Can you open this for me? My four-year-old wants to look at the back of GTA Vice City.” “What battery does my phone take? I didn’t bring it.” “I still can’t find the antennas!” “My dvd player is broken, the picture is all weird when I run it through my vcr!” “Does this camera take pictures?” “Where are the vhs cassette adaptors for my 8mm videotapes? The vhs-c ones don’t fit!” “Can you drop everything you’re doing and find someone with a key so I can unlock the chain on this jacket?” “I STILL can’t find the antennas, please show me where they are because my HBO is all wavy.” “WHERE’S MY VCR?”
Yah, I’m looking for your vcr the whole time.
There are an awful lot of stupid, annoying, and selfish people out there. Sometimes, one of the good folks get lost in the static. I’m sorry.
Oh no, don’t misunderstand me. I was just outlining the underlying economic theory because I thought it might help dissatisfied customers adjust their expectations for a better experience. It’s not how I myself operate. I won customer service awards… I’m just wired that way. There are plenty of people who forego maximizing their wage value through laziness because they enjoy taking pride in their ability to help people. But nobody should expect this level of service.
-fh