Go make some popcorn and gather the family by the glow of your data-receiving device of choice — It’s Worst Company In America time! And it looks like the first blood to be spilled in the WCIA 2012 Octagon of Shame will come from the veins of one of these two retail titans from Minnesota.
Best Buy is no stranger to these brackets, though it’s had trouble with being able to upsell its way out of the second round. Maybe its complete inability to fulfill Black Friday orders by Christmas, or the way CEO Brian “Dunn-dunn” Dunn tried to assure U.S. employees the company was doing fine by talking up all the new stores it’s opening in China, or those Geek Squadders who don’t know the difference between a laptop battery and a power cord, that will finally propel Best Buy into the later rounds.
Target may not have Best Buy’s years of tournament experience to call upon in the Octagon, but it’s certainly screwed up enough times in the last year to merit its spot in the bracket.
After years of riding Amazon’s e-coattails, Target finally took over the reins of Target.com last summer, a move that only served to show how unprepared they were for e-commerce and to fill up our inbox with complaints from customers, like the woman whose debit card was repeatedly charged for the same purchase over the course of several weeks. It got so bad that the President of Target.com departed less than two months after the site’s relaunch.
The company also got no love from retail workers around the country when it shrugged off a petition with 100,000 signatures, asking Target to open just slightly later on Thanksgiving night so staffers could actually enjoy their holiday.
We’ve asked readers to write us at WCIA@consumerist.com with their reasons for condemning or forgiving the companies in this year’s WCIA tournament.
Kimber actually wrote in to defend Best Buy:
My husband has worked for the company for 25 years. Many of our closest friends have also worked for the company for the same number of years or close to. It is a great company to work for or why would someone spend their careers working there?
Well, Wendy was one of many to voice a less loving opinion of the company:
Every item I’ve ever purchased from that store requires more money after the initial purchase. Whether it’s the $140 extra to get the “background ads” off the computer I just purchased or the necessary warranties for everything because it will break or not work at some point in time. And the Geek Squad, also known as “here’s what your warranty includes, but here’s all the other necessary things it doesn’t cover, but will cost $60/hour more because you need it to fix our defective merchandise.”
Their business model is clear: low pricing, hidden costs. In the end, I always spend way more money trying to fix an item than what it’s worth.
Meanwhile, Mike points out that “Target donates a certain percentage back into communities and to non-profits,” which we don’t think most people will have a problem with.
But as numerous e-mails nominating the retailer pointed out, it wasn’t that long ago that Target irked a lot of customers by giving $150,000 to help try to elect a Minnesota gubernatorial candidate who was pro-business but anti-gay.
Okay, okay… enough chit-chat. To quote the great Jeff Probst, “It’s time to vote.”
VOTING FOR THIS POLL IS NOW CLOSED. CONGRATS TO BEST BUY — WE’LL SEE YOU IN THE SWEET 16!
This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2012 series. The companies competing for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. See the entire WCIA 2012 bracket and schedule of match-ups HERE.
This is like the NY Giants vs a little league football team.
Wow, looks like BB is – for once – beating the competition.
Tough choice here. Target is the worse for bait and switch. They’ll advertise some item with a huge discount in their circular, but never have more than one or two in the store. And then often, even the ones they have in the store on display that would be a good buy are unavailable. I was there one day when a customer came in and wanted to buy one of the Flat Screens they had on display. It was one I had been considering as well. He was told they didn’t have it in stock but they might be getting one or two in later in the week and that he should call every morning and then rush to get it.
Best Buy? I had one of the worse problems I ever had with a company last year, involving their cell phone policies. I almost sent it in here but then decided nobody would believe it. You can go in their store and be told six different things from different employees and managers, call the company from inside the store and be told two or three more different things. They can’t even stay on the same page. I haven’t been back since, and when my cell phone comes up for renewal this year I’ll be going elsewhere to upgrade.
You need to learn the difference between limited stock and bait and switch.
Best Buy.
Outrageous pricing, selling open-box items as new, selling bricks because they can’t be bothered to check returns, Geek Squad, lying to customers about product, upselling at the register without even asking permission, loud and annoying stores and receipt checking. I hate them and will never set foot in one again.
I drove by our boarded-up Circuit City today. Ours was awesome. I miss them.
“Outrageous pricing”? You mean, marginally higher than you would find at Wal-Mart?
Or are you only comparing to e-tailers, who don’t have to pay to have stores spread across the country or employees to staff those stores, thus allowing them to operate closer to margin than a store like Best Buy could ever attempt to while remaining solvent?
Best Buy could always reduce prices. Then, they’ll end up just like your beloved Circuit City.
Open Box items are sold as Open Box. The only possible way a purchased item would be sold as new is if it were never actually opened before being returned.
Hate having your receipt checked? You DO realize that the whole point of that is to help curb theft and thereby reduce the cost of products in the store, right? (Of course you don’t.) It’s a simple, harmless measure that drastically reduces theft. Of course, they can always abandon that process and raise prices on everything, if you’d prefer.
Eh, only voted for BB because they tried to charge my MIL an extra $100 to set her computer up and burn a back-up system disk (which should be included with the machine. Why did they stop giving you those anyway? What do they cost, and whole $1 maybe?). How hard is it to set up a laptop for crying out loud!
Something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
Recovery disks haven’t been provided in retail laptops for almost 5 years now. Apple used to provide them and even they stopped. Those disks can range from $25-70 dollars from the manufacturer, not quite $1.
And there are quite a few people out there who don’t know how to burn a disk, or download updates, etc.
I think the other Geek Squad employee there summed it all up pretty nicely.
MANUFACTURERS haven’t been providing recovery discs for years, since they started including recovery partitions on their harddrives (which of course doesn’t help if you have to replace or upgrade the harddrive). Don’t blame Best Buy for the manufacturers’ choices.
You can always burn your own discs at home, which will be cheaper. The problem with this is that many people aren’t even aware of the existence of “recovery discs,” they don’t think to check the packaging to see if their computer has any, and they definitely don’t read the initial setup instructions that come with the computer that tell them to burn such discs on their own.
I can’t count the number of times people have come in because they need a new harddrive installed, but instead of having recovery discs already, they have to send another $50 and wait another week without a computer, all because they have to order them, as they never bothered making them in the first place.
On a similar matter, Geek Squad charging $99 for a data backup (at the lowest levels) definitely seems like a lot, but it’s not Geek Squad’s fault that you never bothered to backup any of your data when Windows was still working, but instead waited until you had a complete crash and decided that there’s something you couldn’t live without. Also not Geek Squad’s fault if you don’t know about taking the harddrive out of your computer and attaching it to an adapter to try to retrieve files.
It always comes back to the same thing: something is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. If you were negligent beforehand, and don’t have a clue what you’re doing now, the service’s value is what you make of it.
…But then again, your argument is also the kind I’ve seen from people who also complain about Best Buy salespeople trying to upsell accessories. You know, things like backup harddrives, recovery discs, etc.
Definitly Best Buy.
Their prices are higher and the service for returns is bad when I went to return an item.
Could you please be a little more specific? I see lots of people throwing out these incredibly vague claims that “customer service is crappy,” but never a thorough explanation of what happened.
Was it an issue with the return period? Was it a matter of coverage? Was the CS rep rude? Was there a long line?
Seriously, I’d much prefer if people with complaints against Best Buy would bother to give some details. (And I mean *all* details. If you’re upset that they don’t accept a return on an item, it slightly changes the situation if you also admit that you bought it two years ago and accidentally ran over it with your car.)
After all, how is a company ever supposed to improve itself if you don’t let it know what, precisely, they do that makes you unhappy. (But keep in mind, you have to be realistic. You could be upset that Best Buy doesn’t give you a $100 bill every time you walk in the store, but that’s hardly a legitimate grievance.)
To close to call
I’ve bought things from both, and niether are as evil as everyone makes them out to be.
Best Buy gets too much hate because everyone on the internet thinks they know how the electronics business should run. Clearly lots of other companies have gotten it right? I understand many of the complaints though.
Target’s website sucks and their return policy is worse. I would give them the vote.
where is the vote button?
“Every item I’ve ever purchased from that store requires more money after the initial purchase. Whether it’s the $140 extra to get the “background ads” off the computer I just purchased or the necessary warranties for everything because it will break or not work at some point in time. And the Geek Squad, also known as “here’s what your warranty includes, but here’s all the other necessary things it doesn’t cover, but will cost $60/hour more because you need it to fix our defective merchandise.”"
…
well, stop being an idiot that breaks all your stuff, and only buys the cheapest of everything. Also, if it has moving parts, for god’s sake get the extra coverage.
I believe Latentius deserves an award for the most loyal, dedicated Best Buy employee ever. The effort put forth here to defend Best Buy is amazing. I am not being snarky either. I am impressed by his dedication.
I still would vote for Best Buy, but talk about loyalty.
Well…thank you…I think. (:-P)
And just because I know someone must be thinking this…no, I’m not being paid to sit here and post comments. I wasn’t even asked to do so. In fact, I’d imagine my superiors probably wouldn’t be happy with someone being an unofficial representative of the company.
Truth be told, I’m not actually that loyal. I’ll buy from my store if they happen to have precisely what I want, and I can get it cheaper (employee discounts can sometimes–but not always–work wonders).
No, I’m just sick of reading all the baseless slander against a company. I think it’s only fair that someone represent the other side of the debate. It’s easy enough to come across tons of anti-Best Buy horror stories online, but how often do you get to hear from the other people? It’s easy to think of them all as faceless evil, greedy pigs, but that’s simply not the case. Most are kind people who do want to help out. I personally try to be extremely polite to everyone, but there are just some people who walk in the store and seem intent on hating the company and being as rude and obnoxious as humanly possible.
I’m not a brainwashed employee (though some co-workers do seem unnervingly loyal), but I am somewhat of a convert. I am, of course, a complete computer nerd and have been all my life. I used to go into Best Buy to just browse around, but rarely would I buy anything. I used to find the salespeople somewhat annoying. I just wanted to be left alone. Also, while I’d never personally had any bad experience with the company, I definitely had a negative opinion of them, due to all the horror stories I’d read online.
And then I started working there. Working in Geek Squad (and right alongside Customer Service), I’ve seen untold numbers of customers who expect the most ridiculous things, and then become irate when someone tries to bring them back to reality. I’ve come to realize that the worst problems customers have are themselves. They are the ones that make the process the ugliest. Yes, the company has messed up on occasion, but at least the situations I’ve witnessed first-hand, they’ve always taken responsibility and resolved the issue.
As for the more generic complaints, I can see the other side to those, too. Yes, a pushy salesperson can be annoying…but that’s such a trivial complaint. All you have to do is politely say “no,” and they’ll leave you alone. They do try to upsell, but there’s a *reason* for it. Imagine you’re a techno-illiterate person, but you decide to get an HDTV because you’ve heard so much about them. Now, what if the salespeople did nothing but get you a TV? Well, chances are you’d take it home, hook it up to your VCR, say that everything looks like shit, and you’d return the TV because you perceive it as being poor quality. Or maybe you get a Blu-Ray player, then go and hook it up with composite cables because no one explained the benefits of HDMI. Again, you’d return the item, saying the quality was awful, and you’d blame the store for selling you a piece of crap. Having those salespeople push accessories on you may be a bit annoying, and they might push more expensive stuff than you really need, but it’s not malicious. They want you to go home and enjoy your purchase. As a business, Best Buy obviously doesn’t want people returning items en masse, especially when the reason for doing so is a lack of knowledge.
As for prices, Best Buy simply cannot compete with Amazon or Newegg. There’s just too much overhead between physical locations and staff. As a computer nerd, I always found it curious why anyone would buy from BBY rather than going online. But now I realize: I’m not the clientele the stores are aimed at. The people who buy from BBY tend to be people who don’t know enough to go comparison shopping on their own. They’re people who need someone who knows the products, someone they can ask questions of, and if they have to end up paying a few more dollars for that help, that’s a worthwhile price.
I’m not trying to be a corporate shill or anything. I just think that the majority of Best Buy’s bad reputation is undeserved, and again, I think it’s only fair that there’s at least *one* person to try and bring the other side’s arguments to the table.
I don’t mean to be rude here, but in Best Buy’s eyes, this could be close enough to trying to speak for the company that you could get in trouble. I would delete your comments if I were you…
I have been fired from a job for answering a question a customer asked me, acting as a representative of the company, when the answer I gave wasn’t in line with what management wanted. (I told her that yes, she could probably decrease her order by about $400 next time and she’d still have enough food for the event she was throwing. Obviously the business didn’t care for that answer, but when I’m looking at $400 worth of food that isn’t going to be eaten, what am I supposed to say?)
Just be careful when you post, okay? Or the next post we’ll see is “Defender of Best Buy in WCIA 2012 canned for comments on Consumerist”.
I recently went in to Best Buy thinking they had a lot of CD’s (boy have they whittled down to next to nothing.) I asked for help and I was told someone would come. After ten minutes, I stopped two salespeople and again they said they would send someone to the CD department. After another ten minutes with no help, I walked out. I will never go back.
Geez, this is no contest- hard for me to believe that anyone here thinks that Target is worse than Bust Buy. Glad the poll results are a well-deserved landslide.
I don’t mean to be rude here, but in Best Buy’s eyes, this could be close enough to trying to speak for the company that you could get in trouble. I would delete your comments if I were you…
I have been fired from a job for answering a question a customer asked me, acting as a representative of the company, when the answer I gave wasn’t in line with what management wanted. (I told her that yes, she could probably decrease her order by about $400 next time and she’d still have enough food for the event she was throwing. Obviously the business didn’t care for that answer, but when I’m looking at $400 worth of food that isn’t going to be eaten, what am I supposed to say?)
Just be careful when you post, okay? Or the next post we’ll see is “Defender of Best Buy in WCIA 2012 canned for comments on Consumerist”.
Glad I missed the voting….I can’t choose between 2 companies I love….