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LEAKS: Best Buy's Internal Customer Profiling Document
Attention Profiled Shoppers: Consumerist is now in possession of an internal training document that teaches Best Buy blue shirts how to stereotype customers. While Best Buy's use of personas has been known for several years, our exclusively obtained document contains several brand-new Best Buy personas, including "Maria Middle America" and "Empty Nesters" Helen and Charlie.
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Monster Responds To "Monster Cables, Monster Ripoff"
Monster Cables, Monster Ripoff: 80% Markups
Ever wonder why gadget store employees push Monster cables like they're crack? Bitchin' markups, just like you suspected (or knew) all along. That's what we found when a Radio Shack employee sent us his store's entire inventory list, which included the wholesale and retail price of every item in stock.
UPDATE: Monster Responds To "Monster Cables, Monster Ripoff" Story
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confessions
10 Confessions Of A Circuit City FireDog Technician
A FireDog Technician writes in with the following confessions. More »Why Does My Cable Company Force Me To Subscribe To All These Stupid Channels?
If you're like most people, you look at your "basic" cable line-up and think: "Why do I have all these stupid channels? Wouldn't it be cheaper if I could just subscribe to the ones I actually like?"
You're probably convinced that there's a huge conspiracy going on to get you to pay for a bunch of crap you don't want.
You might be right. According to the American Cable Association (an organization that is obviously quite biased toward the cable industry) it's not your cable company's idea to force "Lifetime Movies" on you, it's the big media companies themselves that dictate cable line-ups through a technique called "tying and bundling."
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insiders
6 Confessions Of A Former RadioShack Employee
Former RadioShack employee "D" chimes in with a few tips that may come in useful the next time you find that yourself in a RadioShack. We haven't been in one for so long, we're not even sure what they look like inside. Do they still ask for your phone number when you buy batteries?More »
Note: This is not a rant or venting session. I was laid off after the holidays, and I have no hard feelings about it ( Layoffs happen to everyone these days) . This is simply a guide to shopping at RadioShack ( henceforth known as RS) for any consumer who likes or buys electronics,written by someone who's sold far too much of them.
porn
Delete Your Porns: Court Says You Have No Right To Privacy When Your Computer Is Repaired
Evidence uncovered by retail store technicians (i.e. kiddie porn), is legally admissible as evidence in court because, "If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents...," the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ruled December 5th. The case hinged on the question of whether kiddie porn a Circuit City tech found could be admitted as evidence, overturning a lower court's decision. The Superior Court of PA also referred to codecs, computer video compression and decompression software, as "code X."
Police Blotter: Can Circuit City techs legally peruse files? [ZDNET]
(Photo: jadakatt)
Leaks: CompUSA's Going-Out-Of Business Discount List
We've got the CompUSA internal discount list for their going out of business liquidation sale. The discounts are mainly 10% and 20%, with some 5% and 30% in there. Audio hardware, mounting brackets and the like, is 30% off. Just because they're imploding doesn't mean they don't have some pride, as least for now. They're entitled "opening discounts," so perhaps will keep dropping week by week until all the stock is gone. Looks like for now they're using the same close-out strategy as when they closed down most of their stores before: offer crappy deals and advertise the heck out of it.
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leaks
Exclusive: CompUSA's Tentative Liquidation Schedule
A CompUSA repair tech has leaked to The Consumerist what he says is their schedule for the liquidations happening now until they close everything down after the holiday season. This is in no way set in stone, he says, but it looks like this is how it's going to go down starting this week. (He would also like everyone to know that no one his place steals porn from customers). More »Best Buy Porn Thief Inquisitions Revealed
After reading "How Geek Squad Investigated Its Own Porn Thieves," another fired Geek Squad tech has chimed in to tell us how the internal witch hunt for porn thieves proceeded.
I had worked for Geek Squad for over a year, and Best Buy a year and a half before that and was recently let go. Back when they started scanning computers, they said they found downloaded music and movies on our machine and we were to send them the hard drives. So we boxed them up and sent them out.More »A month or so later the interrogations happened. We all had our turn, and when it was mine, I walked into a room with the table pushed against the wall and two chairs in the middle of the room sitting two feet apart with nothing in between.
Leaks: How Geek Squad Investigated Its Own Porn Thieves
Best Buy launched a nation-wide internal investigation after we published a video sting op capturing one of their techs stealing porn from our computer. A fired Geek Squad supervisor tells how it all went down...Innocents fired... Liars kept jobs... Store hard drives seized... Pants shat...The start of the internal Geek Squad investigation began this summer as all of the locations throughout the country were entered through remote connection and scanned for violations. The Geek Squad "precincts" that had bench machines containing serious violations had their hard drives removed and shipped to the corporate office. All of this was done rapidly and under the watchful eye of salary managers who had their jobs threatened if this was not executed properly. My store was lucky enough to have scored well enough on the remote scans to keep our hard drives. I knew at this point that there was serious cause for concern if Best Buy was willing to spend the kind of cash necessary to execute remote scans throughout ALL of its stores in one day.More »
Is This Playstation 3 Too Dusty To Be Repaired Under Warranty?
Best Buy's Myspace Forum For Sharing Dumb Customer Stories
There's a forum on social networking site Myspace where Best Buy employees share the dumbest things customers have ever said to them. They range from the "I probably should find another job:"
wheres the bathroomTo the whimsical... More »EVERY DAY AND I WANT TO KILL MY SELF (NOT REALL) EVERY TIME CAUSE THEY ARE ALWAYS RIGHT NEXT TO THE FUCKING SIGN.
DUMB ASS BITCHES
insiders
Comcast Mole Starts Blog
The Comcast insider who leaked the BitTorrent memo promises to tell all of Comcast's dark secrets at Shortnamenowitsgettinglong.com.
"I am just trying to help spread the truth about how screwed up Comcast is," the insider writes in their first post. "I am not trying to hurt Comcast's reputation or bad talk them, I think they do a good enough job themselves...You will find a lot of good information here. The information you want to see as a consumer and they don't."
We'll be watching, and Comcast will as well.
Inside Comcast
(Photo: cmorran123)
how to
How To Find The Cheapest Roaming Solution When Traveling Abroad
Having the ability to make calls all over the world is a pretty amazing communications milestone, but that doesn't mean it's cheap and easy. The Consumerist is filled with stories of poor fools who come back from parts unknown with thousand-dollar roaming bills—and it doesn't just happen to clueless iPhone users. Here's our attempt to help make some sense out of the mess. More »
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