Best Buysells you boxes of bathroom tiles instead of products; lets Geek Squad steal your personal photos and pornography; sets their cellphones to record you showering while they’re supposed to be fixing your computer, and tries to turn “bad” customers into good ones by pushing you to buy expensive unnecessary extended warranties. They had a “secret website” that looked like BestBuy.com but displayed different prices.
Target sells really complicated napkin holders; won’t talk to bloggers upset about their advertising; makes Diane Von Furstenburg mad, and charges less for three four-packs of Red Bull than it does for one twelve-pack. Their return policy is rather draconian. Target also displays Easter decorations on Dec 26th.
This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2008 series. The companies nominated for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. Keep track of all the goings on at consumerist.com/tag/worst-company-in-america/
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No contest in my mind. I’d rather shop at Best Buy any day rather than Target. Target overly strict polices are not consumer friendly at all. They do not care about the consumer, they ONLY care about the bottom line.
I voted for Target rather than Best Buy, even though BB gets a lot of grief on this blog and Target is actually an OK store, because of lingering bitterness over the fact that no one who looked like Jennifer Connelly ever got locked in the store with me when I was a janitor there. [imdb.com]
There. Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I can get on with my life.
In no way do i think target is abad company, but my experience has turned me off to it. The one in my town knows they are “hot stuff”, so they slack in all the areas people here seem to praise. The prices are consistently higher than Wal-mart. It seems whenever I go to Target there are always 3 different pricetags on items, and the shelving isn’t much help. And those scanners? Always broken. Sure, the girls are cute, but they’re still teenage girls. Which means 5 standing around the checkout area chatting, with 1 register open that always seems to have the slowest checkout girl in history. One final anecdotal peeve, the employees always have the attitude that they’re “just about to close for the night”, even an hour before closing.
While Target is in no way ‘evil’, they’re usually the last retail store I go to.
@vatica40: Wal-Mart customers = trash from every ethnicity. Target = everyone else. P.S. You dont have to “dress all nice” when you go to Target.
I’m no best buy fan, but what about target’s anti-union management brainwashing or its severe environmental lapses? what about its predatory pricing to drive small businesses out? or its dearth of unregulated factories in china? from a purely consumer perspective (and that would be reasonable), I think best buy is worse, but in just about every other regard, target’s presence is a much more destructive one.
@rdldr1: See, I never mentioned Wal-mart, but there you go. That’s a big strike against Target. People go there not because it’s a better store, but because when you leave you can reach in your bag and find a little bonus package of “smug”. It’s pure brand cache.