Because you’re never too rich to steal a few extra pennies
Published by punkass marc March 20th, 2007 in Big Business, Corporate Idiocy
Best Buy: Where a cent stolen spends twice as nice as a Benjamin earned.
According to the earnings spreadsheet in the financial download section of their corporate site, during fiscal year 2006, electronics megosaur Best Buy generated $30 billion in revenue with a gross profit of $7.726 billion.
So could someone please explain to me why they feel the need to swindle consumers out of a few extra bucks?
Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming my reporting that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.
(h/t thank you for not being perky)
The state? Connecticut. The scam? Best Buy’s been showing an intranet site with higher prices than their actual website when customers request the cheaper website price on a computer purchase. The profit? $150/person.
Best Buy acknowledges the existence of the intranet site but claims employees are simply having trouble remembering how to access the external site (a.k.a. the one that always seems to have the lower price). So, essentially, they’re pinning it on their minimum wage employees. Classy.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that if you work at Best Buy, you probably grasp the concept of http://bestbuy.com. And if for some reason you don’t know how or where to type that, the company probably has a responsibility _not_ to put you behind the customer service counter.
The Attorney General of Connecticut sums up the Best Buy reaction well:
“Their responses seem to raise as many questions as they answer,” Blumenthal said in an interview. “Their answers are less than crystal clear.”
As the article notes, Best Buy has already been held liable for deceptive sales practices and failures to honor refunds/rebates in New Jersey, and another case is pending in Ohio. I hope the company understands, then, why this statement rings a bit false:
“As a company, everything we do revolves around our customers’ needs and desires. It is never our intent to mislead them as their loyalty is incredibly important to us,” the statement said.
Whether or not the Connecticut investigation bears actual legal action remains to be seen, but Best Buy has already been proven to rip off consumers for small amounts of money, like refund and rebate amounts.
The behavior is mind-boggling. Assuming they got away with confusing a hundred thousand people with their intranet, company profits would soar from $7.726 billion to $7.7275 billion. Of course, I seriously doubt 100k people are mobbing customer service desks across the Best Buy nation, meaning the actual profit from their little scam’s probably even smaller than that.
To what end?
Best Buy doesn’t have to cheat (or at least, doesn’t have to cheat at this level) to make absurd amounts of money hand over fist. What possesses such a corporation to pursue unfair customer treatment as a policy when the rewards pale in comparison to their honest profits?
Maybe we can get corporate greed classified as an addiction. It sure seems to drive folks to moronic ends for a tiny fix.
$150? I dunno, it seems to me that if I checked a website and then went to the store and found the item to be $150 more, I would continue shopping.
I’m with you, but, apparently, not everyone is so inclined. And yet there’s no way enough people would be so inclined as to expect any noticable profit from such dickery. Best Buy confuseth me.
Something similar happened to me a few months ago, when I bought a digital camera that was on sale at BestBuy.com.
Because I really like shopping for my electronics in person (what? I’m into instant gratification and I hate FedEx) I went into the store, where there was no indication that the camera was on sale.
I told the sales clerk about the sales price on-line and he agreed to give me the sale price so I decided to buy the camera. I wanted to shop around for some camera accouterments so the sales dude put the camera at the register for me.
When I went up to the register the check out clerk wouldn’t give me the sale price. She told me that a lot of people miss small print about when the sale starts but I raised a (very polite) fuss, because I had already been promised the sale price. She called the original sales clerk and there was a bit of muttering over a computer screen before the first clerk finally did the transaction with the sales price. The second clerk refused to ring me up because she said she didn’t want to get in trouble.
Final verdict: sketchy as hell. Probably wouldn’t have gotten a cheap camera if I hadn’t harassed two employees about it.
Kyso:
Best Buy is probably counting on people to assume they must have mis-remembered the price on the website. After all, the salescritter pulled up *the same site*, and the price was clearly higher, right?
If it’s only on big ticket items (a $2000 plasma TV, for example), then $150 could seem like it’s not worth fussing over.
Maybe, but then I’m student-poor, so even on something like a $1500 computer or a $2000 television, I’d step back and take another day to think it over.
Man, I knew there was a reason I hated Best Buy. When I go on their website, they have that “see lower price in cart” thing, but sometimes the price does not go down. Plus, the price they display is usually only available after mail-in rebates that most people don’t bother with.
I hate our pratical-joke based economy: Surprise ! You can’t return things on Thursdays ! That price was good yesterday, but not today ! Etc.