Good catch: correlation is not causation. Best Buy would suck goat taint whether or not xtisme or his sister even existed.
Best Buy has a reasonable, not very liberal, but not draconian, either return policy that has a very simple soultion. You decline to engage in this simle solution for reasons that are your own and are of no consequence to best Buy and you come here to vent. Fine vent away, but when vent in public be prepared to have people call you for being unreasonable.
Secondly, if someone gives me a gift that is broken or doesn’t fit or some other problem with it, then I will have no problem asking them for the gift reciept. However, if I get a GIFT from someone that is not optimally what I want then I may or may not ask for the reciept depending on the relationship I have with that person. However, I would hardly think it is an issue with the seller that I want to avoid embarrassment that I am returning a gift becuase it falls short of my expectations.
After the hard sell at Radio Shack, I was nervous about going into our Best Buy to look at cameras. No worries, when I actually did have a question, the gaggle of six salespeople grouped about ten feet from me didn’t even catch my eye, and I was open to being “sold”! I think I’ve been back in one time since then, just to browse the music section.
Ikea allows you to make returns for in-store credit without a receipt.
But Ikea only sells Ikea merchandize, so it’s not like you could have gotten that little rug from some other store. Also, there’s a limit to the number of times you can return something without a receipt. We discovered this during home renos, when we had so very, very many receipts for everything from light fixtures to band-aids, from all sorts of stores. Occasionally we’d misplace a receipt after we decided that those drawer handles were ugly after all.
shrug I’ve already addressed most of this. I have no problem with people looking at this in a contrary fashion, or thinking me ‘unreasonable’. I also can see why Best Buy might take the stand they have on both the iPod issue and the software. And perhaps Best Buy is representative of how vendors are these days. I admitted that I have been a bit out of touch lately and haven’t returned an item in years…and also that times have obviously changed.
Since I have no intention of asking my sister for a receipt for the item, for my own reasons, I have resigned myself to Best Buy’s policy due to my own unreasonable-ness. Tell me…are you always reasonable? Never get peeved by something, even if there is a logical reason for someone or something to have pissed you off? If so…well, thou art a better man (or woman) than I am.
To each their own I guess. It SURPRISED me that they would not take the item back due to lack of receipt…just as it surprised me that they would not take the software of my friend back even WITH the receipt. The build up of, um, surprise is what sparked all this. They fell short of my expectations because my expectations were based on how things were with the particular vendor the LAST time I returned something. Unrealistic, to be sure…and obviously ‘unreasonable’ of me to still have those expectations in our modern times (which is to say, perhaps 2 years since that last time I took something back…maybe a bit longer. I don’t remember exactly :p).
At any rate, thank you and all the rest for enlightening me on this issue. I will be sure to take this into account for my next encounter. Hopefully nothing I get for Christmas will need to be returned, as even if it’s NOT my sister I feel uncomfortable asking folks for receipts for gifts.
-XT
You are mistaken about the software return policy
From their “Return Policy” webpage.
Also, from their online return policy
So, it looks like unopened software is fine.
What would you have done if you *could *exchange the Nano for a iPod Touch without a receipt? Wouldn’t your sister ask you how you like the Nano at some point? Or, wouldn’t she see you using an iPod Touch instead of the Nano she bought you?
How would you have responded/handled the situation? Isn’t this similar to handling the situation of asking for the receipt?
I’ve never had that problem at the Best Buy near me. Once I bought a DVD not realizing that it was the single disc edition and I wanted the double disc. I took it back, opened, with the receipt. They said “no problem” but it turns out they never got it in stock because it had a ridiculously small circulation (Munich, in case you’re interested) so I had to keep the single disc version.
Another time, I took a sealed CD back to Best Buy (also with the sticker on it) with no receipt. No issues - they took it back, gave me store credit, and let me know that I couldn’t return anything without a receipt again for a certain period of time (a year maybe?).
I’m convinced I have the only good Best Buy and Gamestop(s) (2 of them!) in existence. People always complain about them, but I’ve got nothing but good.
The employees there follow policy unless they see a good reason not to, and the manager encourages autonomy in their decisions, not just following a script. I’ve returned opened software a single time (I didn’t use it, and it was obvious by the way the inner packaging was), the other Best Buys I’m hearing about wouldn’t even look at it without bursting into flames from the thought. When I was upgrading my computer two geek squad employees that were helping (obviously gamers) got into an argument about graphics cards and did benchmark diagnostics for me, just to settle a minor dispute, and because I wasn’t sure which was best (this was when Ge-force and Radeon cards were still competing for the high end market).
However I just walked into my first one in Tempe (I used to live in Tucson) today, and it wasn’t too good. But that may have been the shift or something.
lol…ok. The deep seated reason I didn’t ask her for it is because she lives in Ireland…so, I’d have to ask her to send it to me via mail. So, to answer your question…she would never have known. She bought it for me from a Best Buy where ever they stopped (I assume in one of the air ports, if there are Best Buys in or around air ports) as a surprise because she over heard me talking about it. I didn’t want to ask her while she was out here for Thanksgiving to avoid hurting her feelings…and (wrongfully) thinking that I could simply take it back since it was unopened.
So…now ya’ll know the deep, dark, dank secret! 
-XT
Well…I’M not mistaken. Nor was my friend, seemingly. The chick (and her supervisor) at the Best Buy were mistaken.
-XT
(psssst… See post 23)
I’m still not sure why your friend didn’t pursue this further. It sounds like tempers were short on both ends, and rather than calmly discussing (and educating) the cashier and her manager on their own policy, your friend just got pissed and stormed out. How the hell does that help him, the store who still employs these people, or the customers who have to deal with these employees in the future?
Well, he argued with first the service chick and then her manager (I think assistant manager) for like 20 minutes. My friend is a bit, um, volatile, in these kinds of situations. He gets frustrated easily. He told me earlier he wrote Best Buy’s corporate office for customer support a nasty email laying out the situation and what was said and done…and he linked in the policy that someone up thread provided.
Maybe he’ll get his money back after all.
-XT
I hate Best Buy. I worked there for three days in customer service and had to make a woman cry because she’d bought a super-expensive car stereo system then found out that it wasn’t the right size or something. She came back with the stereo, the receipt, the box, the instruction manual . . . whoops! Where’s all the styrofoam packing? Already got picked up with this morning’s trash? Guess you’ll have to sell this at the pawn shop. Sorry.
And that’s not even the incident that made me quit.
Nordstrom’s is famous for their liberal return policy. They once allowed someone to return a full set of tires…and they don’t even sell tires!
I worked in Electronics Retail Management for a number of years and this sort of thing happened a lot (People returning incomplete items, not the crying).
Here’s the thing: Electronics generally have bugger-all margin in them. As in, if someone returned, say, a $50 Transistor Radio, and it was missing the styrofoam packaging or anything else, we’d have to re-sell it at a lower price; at least $5 off.
If the Radio cost us $35 we were only making $15 anyway. So we cut $5 off that and we’re making $10 on the radio. Take $5 GST out and we’re making $5 on that radio when it gets resold. Assuming we can re-sell it.
And that $5 isn’t even going to come close to covering all the time involved in demonstrating the radio to Customer 1, going through the refund process with them, then demonstrating the product to a second[ customer (People won’t take your word on it for what the radio sounds like, they want to hear it themselves).
Now, on a $50 radio we’d just do the refund anyway- happy customer etc. But when people started trying to return opened iPods because someone got them a newer model as a present a week later, or returning cordless phones missing all the packaging and with numbers etc stored in them because their cousin gave them his spare phone which he didn’t need, we had to start saying “Look, I’m sorry, but No, this product is not in a resaleable condition, there’s nothing wrong with it, and what are we supposed to do with a not-new item that we can’t sell above cost price?”
All this is a long way of saying “Low margins have killed a lot of the leeway stores used to have with returns”. Remember, they’ve got a clueless Corporate HQ above them demanding to know why this weeks sales figures are down .087% on this time last year, and when there’s so little money to be made on the stuff in the first place, it gets very, very difficult for the staff and management to deal with.
(This was largely why I quit my job, incidentally- we just coudn’t win. Make the customer happy and Head Office would chew us out for poor sales. Refuse the refund because the item was unsaleable and the customer might complain; and we’d have to take an even larger hit sales-wise when we replaced the item for the customer AND get a double chewing out from head office. Talk about a Catch-22.:mad:
Isn’t that a well-debunked Urban Myth?
I’ll just post a quick counter-example regarding Best Buy. I got a Wii game for my birthday in July (it probably wasn’t even from Best Buy but I knew they stocked the game). It had no Best Buy sticker and I had no receipt. I selected a game I wanted that was the same price as the one I got as a gift and they did the exchange with no problem. Was this against their store policy? I have no idea. Did they somehow lose money by being reasonable people? I don’t see how - they get to sell the item on their shelves (less any cost associated with restocking it). I guess the only opportunity for loss is if the game was stolen.
The Best Buy in my area only takes back unopened software for a refund. If it is opened, you can’t get a refund, you can only get another, unopened, exact copy of the software you are bringing back. But I found a loophole.
If you bring back opened software, exchange it for a new, unopened box of the same software. Carry it home and DO NOT open it. The next day, bring it back unopened and they have to give you your money back. It worked for me on many PC games.
When is this bit of bullshit going to finally die?