Best Buy Sells "New" Laptop Used By Employee
Best Buy sold Clif a "new" laptop one of their employees had bought, used, and returned. They made up for it by giving him an actually new laptop with a slightly better configuration, then tried to upsell him to the Best Buy extended warranty. Two things I enjoyed about this story: 1) The clerk he went to return the laptop to was the same employee who had used the laptop (Clif knew this because he saw the guy's resume on the laptop) 2) Clif then subsequently asked to speak to the manager in private and explained the situation there. That's the classy way to do it.
Worst? Buy [Clif Guy all the time] (Photo: Maulleigh)
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Comments:
Gamestop pulls the same garbage, but with games.
I've seen many employees at my Best Buy eff around and scam the store, however I don't understand why the laptop didn't get sent to the manufacturer if it was opened. Unless the employee somehow stole it for temporary use and returned it. But yeah, if the employee did in fact buy it and return it, then the person at customer service was an idiot to not check it out. At my store, we even had to break the seals to look at the laptop before returning it. Therefore, this problem would have been avoided in the first place if the customer service associate did the return correctly.
If he's looking to cause trouble for BB (which I heartily applaud), he needs to contact the RIAA and Microsoft. Neither organization will take it lightly that their intellectual property is being handed out like that. BB would pay huge amounts of hush money to their enforcers.
It's always great when a company screws a customer and that customer turns out to be a regular blogger.
If I was a manager of a retail store, I would tell all my employees "Treat every customer as if they were a prolific blogger. Because, some of them will be."
@Onion_Volcano: Tell me about it. I've walked out when they've offered me gutted games as new. Worst part is, they encourage their employees to do it 'so they know more about the games they are selling'.
@weakdome: With that level of quality customer service, the clerk has a bright career awaiting him at Circuit City!
I agree that this was a return gone wrong, but I'm really questioning the employee who left a TON of not only personal information on the PC, but illegal downloads.
The computer was a cheaper price, so it was potentially an open box discount that no one alerted the OP to. Perhaps BB thought that the OP already knew it was an open box.
But personal info on the comp? Big no-no. When I get rid of technology, I keep the hard drives. No matter what.
@weakdome: One has to question the intelligence of an IT job seeker who leaves sensitive info unprotected.
@Rctdaemon: I used to work at Gamestop a long time ago and what you said is so true. I always hated gutting a new copy just so we could display it and then realize once that's the last copy, some poor unfortunate soul is going to buy it.
If I were the OP, and they had given me the upgrade, when they asked me if I wanted the extended warranty I would have said, "Really? That's very generous of you! You've kept yourself a lifelong customer!"
I would love to have seen the manager wriggle out of that one.
It's just friggin lazy anyway, even for schadenfreude. In the world of 32 and 64GB flash drives, why any enterprising BB employee/scammer is not storing things on a USB drive is beyond me.
prolly cuz it's already full of customer's personal photos and videos copied from the computers they were working on =/
Seems that for every horrible Best Buy story here, there is a decent one. Odd.
I'm really confused how it's possible. When you return an item, it prompts you if it's been opened. A laptop that's been opened always prints out a big ass sticker that says "Send to PRC (think mfg)" due to customer privacy issues. If they put it as not opened, then the system sees an extra new laptop and inventory is jacked up and the inventory manager likes to fire people for things like that.
I'm not really sure I see a "story" here. Seems that the employee pulled a fast one on the store, customer took it home, realized it was a problem, took it back to BB, who proceeded to not only exchange the laptop and appologize, but upgraded him to a better model (well, same model, better specs). Yet he doesn't seem satisfied with this and believes that wasting his time contacting Dell is somehow useful. I hate busybodies that want to call and complain to everyone over an issue that isn't really an issue. BB didn't tell him to piss off or call him a liar. They promptly and seemingly appropriately resolved the situation. Am I missing something?
I just found out the other day that BB keep track of what you buy in their store. Use their card, use your card. The only way you are not track is if you pay by cash. I am dealing with a lost laptop and other stuff. Seems the lawyer was able to get what I have been buying from them for sometime. The only things they did not have on file was my cash items.
@Pylon83: I was all with the guy until the last two paragraphs, when he pulled the "I'm entitled to more free stuff for this grave injustice" card.
Cause the injustice wasn't all that grave. His laptop wasn't new as expected. Best Buy exchanged it for a new one that was slightly better. Sounds like a satisfactory solution to me.
@Ben_Q2: The would have that information if you let them. Quite frequently I'm asked by a cashier, when spending cash, what my postal address, phone number, and/or email address are. Depending on the stubbornness of the cashier my stock responses are "I'd rather not divulge personal information," or "It's none of your damned business." There is no need for a store that already has your business to barrage you with unsolicited advertisement. What ever happened to opt-in email/postal mail lists so that special offers and promotions were only sent to those who wanted them?
Sounds like a joe job. Download someone's resume and set them up.
Wow. Well done handling that. I'm sure that the manager, and the GS employee appreciated your discretion. I'm not surprised that they didn't give you the warranty for free though. They took a huge hit on you already....
Looks like the BB employee is in the clear then... since it was a valid purchase and return...
Nice to see how the Geek Squad do not care for passwords and love pirated software!
@TheStonepedo: Just make up fake phone numbers, zips, emails, etc. Works like a charm! Has the added benefit of forcing BB to clean up their databases after evetyone goves out bogus info.
@Pylon83: @Pylon83: @Pylon83: I'm hoping that the offense was caused by their trying to sell the extended warranty to the OP.
BB should have left well enough alone when they replaced the unit. The manager should have deduced that further DB-gery could be avoided by keeping his fool mouth shut and not trying to make a sale.
Am I giving the OP too much credit by assuming that he would have stopped at the blog post and not taken it any further had the upsell not occured?
@Gstein:
I agree it shouldn't have happened, but if the employee did it without their knowledge, you can't fault them beyond a little negligence, and they certainly don't owe the guy anything more than he already got. It's the OP's attitude of entitlement that I think is inappropriate.
@Pylon83: You sure are. An employer is responsible for what their employees do in the scope of their employment. If a Best Buy employee gives excellent, above-and-beyond customer service, do you think Best Buy is going to say "Whoa, hey now, no props for us, he's the employee, not the whole company"? Best Buy hired the guy. They're responsible. Sorry.
@mythago:
Well, when the employee is doing something beyond the scope of his employ, Best Buy isn't really responsible. When he provides good service, that's within his job duties and Best Buy gets credit. When he steals, or say punches a customer in the face, that's outside the scope of his job and BB isn't responsible.
@Pylon83: It's called respondeat superior. "Scope of employment" doesn't mean that Best Buy is only responsible when the guy does good things. If he sells a customer "new" merchandise that isn't, that's attributable to Best Buy.
You didn't get the definition of perjury right, either. Please don't post about what the law does or doesn't say if you don't know what you're talking about.
@axiomatic: We are no longer allowed to have flash drives on our person why on the clock. There are other practices being implemented to better protect customer data.
@vastrightwing: True as that may be, it sure makes it easy to find receipts for electronics you might have bought without an extended warranty. If we can find the receipt and it is within warranty we can fix it and bill the manufacturer. I can think of 3 laptops that I have replaced the HDD in this month under this scenario.
I know a lot of you hate best buy, but since I have to have a second job, I might as well work where I can try to help people.
Everytime you purchase an item at Best Buy, God kills a puppy. :(
It was a screw-up... they didn't reformat the computer and I'm surprised they sold it as new. That's pretty darn crappy. But he got a free computer upgrade and yet he feels entitled to more? That seems a bit much...
The mistake was big, but he was only slightly inconvenienced...
@BuddyGuyMontag: "I'm really questioning the employee who left a TON of not only personal information on the PC, but illegal downloads."
Well he works for GeekSquad so chances are he has no clue how to use a computer.
Ive had multiple times where ive bought open-box items from BB and CC that they assure me are complete, only to get home and realize that they are missing something major, like a charger. I guess I should check in the store, but sometimes I just dont have time, and have no choice but to rely on these idiots.
This is HILARIOUS. I love it when a company gets totally busted for pulling unethical things... and when an employee gets caught up in it, its the icing on the cake.
@mythago:
Best Buy may be responsible, but they made up for it IMO. I think an apology and an upgraded model is pretty fair for their mistake, negligence, or whatever you want to call it.
@xip: Oh, I agree - they took responsibility. Just tired of people trying to excuse stupid companies by making up fake law.
@techstar25: Shouldn't that just be common sense though? If I had to tell an employee something so basic, they would be an ex-employee.
Maybe I just see the glass as half full, but a laptop that came with an enterprise copy of Office and 23Gb of music... I don't know as I would be complaing too hard about it being used for 3-4 weeks as long the hardware is intact, the software can be managed or even reloaded with the disk that comes with the machine should it become a major problem.
Resolution sounds decent enough though, so he got a decent deal either way.
@mythago:
What I said about perjury was an oversimplification. What I said about respondeat superior was correct, but my example was poor. The employee who sold him the laptop is probably not the one that put it back in there. If the company essentially stole the laptop from BB, then put it back in the box after using it for awhile, that's clearly not within the scope of his employment. My "Example" was simply a response to the comment above it, which brought up the issue of doing good. Really, the respondiat superior argument can't even be made here, as there aren't enough facts to know exactly what happened. I suppose my poorly articulated point was that the fact BB sold him the laptop doesn't automatically make them responsible for the fact it had been used before, particularly if the reason it had been used before was essentially employee theft.
@HiEllie:
I'm not sure, given the information we have, that one could authoritatively say that BB pulled something unethical here. There is no way to know if they had any idea that an employee had used that laptop in the past.
@Pylon83: What you said about perjury was flat-out wrong. What you continue to say about employer liability is also flat-out wrong. You don't understand what scope of employment means. It doesn't mean that if an employee commits a tort while on the job, the employer is off the hook since torts are not part of the job description.
If this employee were selling personal laptops on eBay, Best Buy wouldn't be responsible. As a Best Buy employee, he sold the OP a used laptop as new. Best Buy is responsible (and, to their credit, they didn't try to pretend otherwise).
@Modred189: While I'm not surprised that they didn't offer it for free, they shouldn't have tried to sell it to him in the first place (especially if he refused THE FIRST TIME). If they had left well enough alone, the OP might not felt that little extra sting that prompted him to tell Dell on them.
@mythago:
What I said about perjury, that it only applies to statements made in court, is an oversimplification. I didn't really want to get into the fact that it also covers sworn out of court statements that are to be used in court. For all intents and purposes, the fact that it applied to depositions was irrelevant to my point and would have simply complicated the matter. Thus, I went with the simplification that it just applied to things said in court. I could have copied and pasted caselaw or linked to wikipedia, but instead I chose to generalize and simplify.
With regard to this issue, I'm not "flat out wrong." The issue of whether respondiat superior would truly apply here if the OP were to sue is a debatable one. You believe it would apply, I believe it would not. Neither one of us can be "right" as we don't have all the facts. We don't know how the laptop got back into the box, thus we can't really make a proper conclusion. I'm working on the assumption that the employee stole the laptop, and ultimately returned it, not informing anyone in the store. The employee then went about things business as usual. Then another employee sold the OP the laptop. It think if that were truly what happened, one could argue that the employees actions were well outside the scope of his employment and were not done with a desire to benefit the employer in any way (an element of respondiat superior in some jurisdictions, like IL/7th Circuit). That said, I recognize that there certainly is an agrument that BB would indeed be liable, but I feel that if it were in a jurisdiction that evaluated whether or not the employees actions were done with serving the employer in mind, I don't think its a winner. You're being somewhat bull-headed in absolutely refusing to recognize the other side of the issue. If the employee in question did indeed sell the laptop to the customer, as you assert, I agree, you win. But we don't know that. All we know is that he was working CS when it was returned. Without more facts, we are both free to assume as we please. Under my assumptions, I think I'm right. Under yours (that the employee did indeed sell the laptop to the OP), you win. How's that?
Well... at least the employee is prepared to start looking for another job.
Hope he saved that resume.