Best Buy Employees Test Out Your Phone, Flip You The Bird, Before You Even Enter Store

Over the years, we’ve posted stories about Best Buy staffers monkeying around with customers’ property when dropped off for service, but here’s a story about a man who went to pick up his new phone at BB, only to find that store employees had been testing it out by taking photos of each other flipping off the camera.

Over at AndroidCentral.com, a reader writes in to describe what happened when he went to pick up his new Samsung Epic 4G Touch and decided to open up the box while a Best Buy staffer finished his paperwork.

That’s when he found a photo of a Best Buy blue shirt giving the middle finger to the camera.

He writes:

I spoke to their manager and he just made excuses. “When we get in new devices the techs like to open them up and explore them a bit” was his reasoning. I then asked why would there be such a vulgar photo on my phone then and he went on to say that they should have deleted it before it was sold. Awesome.

Or maybe they shouldn’t be opening phones, using them and then selling them as new?

Since he obviously wasn’t going to get anywhere with this manager, the reader tried again later with a different supervisor, one who didn’t simply dismiss his concerns:

She apologized profusely and expressed her frustration and assured me this is not regular Best Buy behavior. She assured me the employee… would be adequately reprimanded. She guaranteed me a new phone which she would personally pick up at a sister store (seeing as how this was the only Best Buy in the district to stock the phone and my friend and I were the first two to get the two out of six of they had received). I just have to stop by again tomorrow morning to get my new *crosses fingers* Epic 4G Touch. Which works out great since the “new” one I purchased this morning is refusing to charge. It’s been plugged in all day and it’s only at 70% battery. I was really hoping to have a chance to play with this phone after having waited for months to get it in my hands. She even threw in a $25 gift card for my problems. It makes me really sad and frustrated to know these types of situations still occur. Who knows what these retailers decide to do to these seemingly “new” devices before selling them. I hope at least in this instance this employee learns his lesson and this store in particular does a better job at training their employees. This shoddy behavior is highly unprofessional and one would think a big chain like Best Buy would have better practices in place in order to prevent these situations from occurring.

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