You know, unlike
Blockbuster, I don't dislike
Best Buy enough to stop shopping there. Mostly because
Best Buy doesn't have the competition that Blockbuster has. But Best Buy is rapidly approaching crossing that line.
My parents were kind enough to get me a gift certificate for Christmas. I used it to purchase a Divx/DVD player and
Quake 4. Because they didn't have the Divx player at their Idaho Falls location (there is no Pocatello store, sadly), I decided to order everything online. The problem is that instead of shipping Quake 4 ($40), they shipped The Sims 2 ($25). At first I thought that I had screwed up and ordered the wrong game, but the receipt said Quake 4. Of course, I was a bit worried in that I had no proof that they had sent me The Simms and for all they know I am trying to rip them off.
When I went to the Idaho Falls store to make a return. Sure enough, they wanted to charge me the $15 for the "exchange." Eventually, though, because I was armed with a receipt for Quake 4 they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt.
At least that's how it seemed.
Because I was exchanging products of unequal value, I had to "return" Quake 4 (The Simms 2, but they wrote it down as Quake 4), and then "buy" Quake 4 again. I had to pay for the new Quake 4 up front, but she sent the information for the return while I stood there and I even got a receipt for it.
At least that's how it seemed.
Flash forward a couple days and I look at my bank statement and they only refunded $12.31. I looked at the receipt again, and sure enough it said $44.48 total, $12.31 to to my credit card and the other $32.17 to my gift card.
So I called Best Buy to get this straightened out. Apparently, since the original copy of the game I bought was on the gift card, they refund had to go to the gift card (the $12.31 is now much I went over the gift card expense for both the game and the player). When I explained that this was an exchange and that I had re-purchased the game (and offered her the store number and transaction number on my receipt), she said that as far as she was concerned this was a return and all returns must go back to the card so that people don't turn the card in to cash.
I told them that this was all addressing their error to begin with, but she said that if I wanted an exhange I should have sent it back to them by mail to deal with their online arm. I told her that the site explicitly states that I can take it to the store. Furthermore, it was that claim that made me feel comfortable buying it online to begin with. Having a store to take it back to if there is a problem was a big selling point with me.
To no avail.
So all their screwups have resulted in forced extra business from me.
Unfortunately stores are being pains due to all the crap people pulled when they tried to accommodate the customers.
Best Buy use to have a great return/exchange policy. But enough people abused the system that they were forced to make a lot of drastic changes to it. Now customers are unhappy.
I happen to dislike shopping online myself. It's quick, it's easy, it's cheap.... until there's a problem.
When I first got up here I asked what some good computer stores around here were. The answer was almost uniformly "newegg.com".
In Houston the only things I would buy online were the things would break. Books, movies, etc. Computer parts, especially problematic ones like RAM and mobo/CPUs, I would never buy online.
Unfortunately there just aren't the options up here. The only reason I made the online order was that there is only one Best Buy in Eastern Idaho and it is a small one that doesn't have a lot of things you would expect a Best Buy to... such as a Divx-playing DVD player.
The game, was of course, optional, but I wanted to make it all a single order cause I thought it would be simpler that way. And it would have been had they not stuffed the wrong box.
As for Best Buy's return policy, I understand it for the most part. But it was verifiable that I did, in fact, spend the money that they refunded me. That's what irritated me. It would have been another thing if there were the open question if I was trying to convert my gift certificate card in to cash, which they do have to look out for. That's my point of irritation. As far as my overall dislike of Best Buy, follow the links in the post for specifics.
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