Today CompUSA tomorrow Best Buy, time and karma are both a bitch.

BestBuy ! = BestBuy.com

- End of Line -

I got my 30GB Zune for about $100 on Amazon last month.

Aren't the kiosks inside the store diverted to a bizarro Bestbuy.com with prices that match the store prices?

Your kids are going to hate the Zunes.

Good luck with the Zune....

Sorry man, but being a reader of this website, you should know that Best Buy sucks, so it shouldn't come as a surprise.

The way I always understood the process was this: if the item was marked (and I mean *clearly* marked on the product page at the time of purchase) "Online Only," price matches were usually out of the question. Otherwise, the store would match the price on their website.

This question came up frequently when I worked at a certain red-shirted competetor of BB, and we always price-matched anything that wasn't plainly marked an online only special. It may have been just my manager who thought that our store was merely an extension of the online store, and thus obligated to match the price, but I always liked that approach.

@warf0x0r: Bears repeating

You went though all that bullshit to save $23? You spent more in gas and agrivation.

Wow, you shop at Best Buy *and* you're buying a Microsoft Zune?

*blinks*

I'm just sayin...

Sorry dude... shopping at brick and mortar stores just isn't worth it sometimes. Especially when dealing with crappy 'store policies' like this. Better luck next time.

"Why does Best Buy hate it's customers?"

Statistically speaking, most consumers are un-informed idiots. Of these un-informed idiots, electronics consumers are the worst. Ergo, Best Buy employees are in the 9th circle of consumer hell (right in there with Judas, Brutus and Cassius). And if you worked there, you'd learn to hate the customers too.

/You don't get to reply to me unless you've worked a retail job at some sort of big box store.

best buy stores and bestbuy.com are held to different sales quotas and operate 'independently' from each other. kinda like they compete with each other for sales. i have found MANY occasions where i cant get the two to cooperate.

it seems like a silly idea to make the two entities work against each other, im not sure why they do it this way. i dont understand how this is a successful business model because it inevitably pisses off the customer who cant differentiate the two.

@SaveMeJeebus:

We ran into this when trying to purchase our LCD TV. Online it was clearly on sale (and no where did it say "online only"). In the store, it was on sale for a different price. When the Best Buy associate brought up the page on a kiosk in the store, it showed the in-store price on the kiosk page, NOT the price we had just seen at home. Instead of explaining this to us, he just said, "This is the price it is online, it says right here on the website" like as if we were idiots. So, we went home and printed out the page that showed it was on sale for $200 cheaper than in the store. They met us halfway and gave us $100 off the price.

I still felt gypped, but a week later we stopped in and the price in the store was even lower than the price online, and they gladly gave us the price difference.

Best Buy usually makes me want to poke my eyeballs out, but sometimes...like .05% of the time...they can be okay.

I agree...all of that for $20 some bucks? And you lost the reward certs. Sure,you'll get them back in a month but.....

Seems like way too much of a runaround for $20. Once you had the Zunes in your home and they were paid for I would have just let it go....at some point it's not worth it. Plus,you saved $20 with the certificates. I mean...gee wiz. It's not like it was $50 difference.

Most stores do have different online prices than in store. I mean,yeah it's stupid but unless you just came from Mars you should know this.

I went to SPRINT but found that by getting service online you can A) save on the activation fee and B) get instant savings with no rebate. So,rather than pay Sprint $35 for activation and wait 3 months for my $50 check I went back to cancel and get service online....well,AFTER the one guy pulled the plug on my account another guy comes over and say's "oh,we would have priced matched the phone". THEY TELL ME AFTER THE FACT!!!!!

What you went through happens all over.

Oh,and by the way...I had a 4GB Zune. It's complete garbage and the software will induce a psychotic episode guaranteed.

in all fairness, this is the stuff that happens when you get seasonal employees. Some work as second jobs just for a little extra money and don't want to work at Best Buy forever. Employees can get confused about a policy, and some are more lienent while there are by the book. There is not much time to train seasonal employees about much of anything. The same thing happens at every store this time of year.

...At the same time, this certainly has me thinking twice before going to "Best Buy".

people in blue shirts, trying to sell me an extended warranty on a DVD is pretty rediculous, anyways...

SNAZZ- my guess is that the store doesn't get credit for an online order and in-store pickup, credit goes to the website. Therefore, the stores are going to do as little as they can to support this because it depletes their stock and they don't get credit for it as a part of bonuses, incentives, etc. Of course, in the end, we lose.

Heh. Zunes.

Bestbuy != bestbuy.com
staples != staples.com
etc
etc

Zunes for Christmas? You'll be parent of the year!... In the same sense that Alberto Gonzales was named Lawyer of the Year, and George W. Bush was once Time's Person of the Year

I guess this will teach you to pay more attention for the Online Only disclaimer next time you look stuff up online. If I was the manager, I would have told you the same thing, just because it doesn't seem you are smart enough to shop at my store. But I'm a vengeful person in that way.

I work for BestBuy.com and the website is definitely very different than any stores. Website items come from a warehouse, in-store items come from stores. Different stores have different prices for items. Zunes in your area are probably higher than they are in my area and are apparently higher than on the website. The store down the street from me is usually cheaper than our website because everything is really cheap where I live.

Oh and the reason we offer in-store pickup for items that are available in your local stores so associates can sell you more things. Definitely. That and we don't have to pay to reship the items that UPS loses.

@freshyill: @mexifelio:

Wow. Why do you children have to be jerks about the gift. Focus that teenage angst towards best buy and not towards the product itself.

for the record zunes are nice. i love my 30 gig zune esp with the new software.

@TexasScout: I would go through all that for $23. I've gone through a lot for $5. It's not the amount--but the principle. I'm glad this guy got his money back.

I went through a similar sort of thing at Circuit City last month, different item, same potential mess when the price in-store was almost 100 dollars different from the price on their website (expensive item). I tried to explain it to the first guy, who didn't seem to "get" it.

But he got another guy, and once I explained the situation to the second clerk in detail (including the part where it did not say "online only"), he immediately got a manager to do an override on the sale and honored the correct price right then and there.

It took all of 5 minutes and they were all very polite and helpful. even the guy who wasn't sure he could help.

Moral: there are non-Best Buy places that want your business and will treat you fairly. Places like... well, pretty much anyplace that isn't Best Buy.

Now with compusa out of the picture and circuit city doing bad. Best Buy's the big boy in tonw and they can do whatever they want.

What they don't understand is that one day, places like NFM and American TV, will take over their sales. Because they are ablet o provide better customer service and have even more Margin than best buy does w/ a ton of furniture they sell.

But that is 10 years down the road possibly.

Not that I'm antizune, never had one, but kids are label conscious. If they're okay with a zune instead of an ipod, that's fine, but just in case, I'd keep the receipt safe and know what their return/exchange policy is.

@gingerCE: What about iPuds?

10,000 points for anyone who knows that reference.

I had something happened to me with best buy. Recently I get fridge from them and online was 675 and in the store was 749. Of course while in the store they try to show me the inside bes buy page and i tell them show me the real page, not your intra net, and waved my printout. They price match it and used the saving the buy a warranty, yes I know, I should of not, but after all is a 5yr warranty and a fridge you keep for 10 yrs.

Zune? and from Best Buy? it's like reading a book where the main character gets killed in the first sentence!

I think it's definitely fair to say that Bestbuy.com and Bestbuy are two different stores. It doesn't help that the online store and the website that represents the brick and mortar store are just about one in the same. Online only, and In Store only prices is always clearly marked though.

Jeez, the worst part about this is reading that horribly written letter. I'm sorry, but if you want to be taken seriously it helps to compose proper sentences and not use five question or exclamation marks at the end of them.

Plus, I agree with the sentiment about going through way too much trouble for such a small amount of money. The principle thing? Come on. Corporations like Best Buy have never and will never have any principles or care at all about having them. All you did was inconvenience the crap out of yourself for a few bucks. Yay for you.

@smitty1123: As a retail employee, it's YOUR JOB to deal with that. YOU are the representative of you store, and worse, for you, YOU CHOSE THAT JOB! Don't be all "high and mighty." Maybe if you had a good attitude at your job, people would find you helpful and listen to what you have to say. I don't generally listen to condescending store clerks, but, then again, I am very selective about where I shop.

after all the posts about how customer service at best buy is horrible, why are people still surprised about this? and why do they still shop there?

Another poorly written rant about not much of anything. Cosumerist, if the submissions you're getting are no better than this, please stop printing them.

In the end if you do not like a policy return the items, and from then forward boycott. In the end headaches will be saved and blood pressure reduced. At this point I have quit shopping more places than I do shop.

I went to Best Buy this past weekend to purchase an iTouch for my father-in-law. I had seen it on Best buy.com for $15 cheaper (in the shopping cart) and for $17 cheaper in Circuit City's shopping cart. I had to go to the Customer Service counter to complete the purchase and I just asked them if they would honor the online price (knowing that like others have mentioned, brick and mortars compete vs online). I even mentioned the Circuit City price. And they looked up their own online price, asked me again the Circuit City price and price matched it, just like that. Honestly, most of the people working in the Best Buy near me are idiots, and I always wave them off. I continue to go there, b/c I've been a Reward Zone member for years, thus getting discounts in the mail all the time.

@ldavis480: i hope you arent making fun of the new Zune because its better then the 5g ipod, in fact its better then every ipod aside from the touch and even thats subjective.

The new zune is easier to use then the 5g and older ipods, its got better features too so...no need to bash.

Last year, in an attempt to solve some holiday season headaches, I ordered two items online from CircuitCity.com, about 2 hours before the store closed. I arrived the next day at opening, confirmation in hand, to learn that they only had one of the two items in stock. I pointed at the confirmation and the '$24 gift card if it is not ready in 24 minutes' guarantee, but the manager refused to give me the gift card. Conference calls to corporate, including a conference call with the manager did nothing. I wasted way more than $24 of their time, but more than that of mine as well. Never shopping CC again...

Wait, this is a Best Buy story? Same difference...

I absolutely hate best buy and this is just more reason why. They treat their customers like trash, over price their products and screw people in to paying for things they don't need.

I bought a laptop from best buy once and they told me I would not be able to reformat it without paying 150 dollars for their "service plan" which basically involved installing all these useless programs i didn't need. Turns out, by ability to reformat they meant burn me some DVDs of the back up information on the harddrive, in other words paying for something i didn't need, and ended up getting screwed over BIG time.

I wish Amazon would ship electronics to Canada :(

@marsneedsrabbits: I've got a story which suggests a different moral.

Last year, my wife and I bought an HDTV. We first ordered from Circuit City. As we were closing the sale, the clerk there gave us a boatload of bull about how Consumer Reports said that extended warranties on HDTVs are a must, blah blah. Anyway, I gave him a firm "no". I was pretty sure he was full of it but I checked anyway what Consumer Reports said and indeed there was no such recommendation. He said we would have the TV in a week. Yeah, I was naive but that's the TV I wanted and CC had the best price, even better than reputable online stores. The week passed and we did not hear anything. We went to the store and got to talk with other people and eventually I was able to extract out of them that CC had a supply problem and basically had no clue when the TV would be in. I was pissed so I canceled the order.

Then I found that BestBuy had the very same TV in stock. I told my wife that it would be worth going and see if we could get them to match CC's price. We went. We talked to a very nice and helpful clerk. I told him CC's price and asked him to match the price. He checked on CC's web site. He corrected down the price I had given him. Yep, I had made a mistake when I quoted the price to him, about $100 more than the real price on CC's site. We concluded the deal and we were on our way happy as clams, TV in car. He did not at any point mention an extended warranty.

The moral I propose is this: the quality of service you get from those chains depends more on the people working there than on the chain. For sure the chain sets the broad parameters of the deals but the people in store have a fair amount of leeway. They can totally screw you over but they can also give you a better deal than what corporate would allow for. Case in point: I read BestBuy's price matching policy after we came back home with the TV and found that if the clerk had followed the policy to the letter he should not have matched the price.

There are two BestBuys near where we live. I'd definitely go back to the one we bought the TV from for big items, if the price is right, but I would not go to the other BB near us. Obviously, I would never go back to the CircuitCity near us for anything. Then again, I buy most of my electronics online.

as a customer, i think we should organize a consumer take over of best buy and reorganize the whole company!!!!!!!

@gingerCE: Sorry, I have to agree with TexasScout.

If the guy researched the Zunes on the BB site, saw the price he liked and knew they had in-store pickup, why didn't he take things to his logical conclusion and finish the order for in-store pickup?

I do this all the time at FutureShop (Canuck for BestBuy) - short line and only one snotty, inexplicably self-important nerdling. (And, I can say "No" to extended warranty as many times as necessary.)

Every time I feel the need to go to best buy I just crush my own testicles, drink a glass of hate, and order "it" online. This way I can enjoy my "holiday feelings" at home.

@SaveMeJeebus: yep....shady