Loyal Consumerist Danilo slowly accrued Best Buy points, only to be foiled by retarded web design.

He loaded up the gift certificates in his browser, but Best Buy wouldn’t let him print them out.

Danilo missed the tiny print below the big yellow button that said the printing…. only works in Internet Explorer.

You only get two shots to print. Danilo fudged both and now has to wait a month before trying to print again.

Best Buy sucks. Stop shopping there. Danilo’s letter inside.

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“Gentlemen,

Having worked within the belly of the beast for two years when I was a lad, I rarely have good things to say about Best Buy.

I’m not going to start now, either.

I purchased a 32″ LCD television from Best Buy many weeks ago. Best Buy offers a $10 subscription to a one-year loyalty plan that gives you points per purchase when you shop there. These points can be turned into gift certificates for the store.

So, after many weeks of waiting, the sizable chunk of points accrued from my big purchase ceased to be “pending” and were convertible to reward certificates, according to an E-Mail BBY sent to me. I eagerly loaded the page in Firefox to print out those certificates and then I got screwed.

It seems their printing mechanism only works in IE. They make note of this in tiny print below a rather noticeable, yellow button that blithely encourages you to proceed with printing.

Anyone who has attended a few days of even the most rudimentary web development classes would be able to disable that button and show an alert to users browsing with Firefox. Best Buy, on the other hand, makes the user think everything is working fine. When the user discovers that not to be the case, it’s too late — you only get two shots at printing your certificate and it has to happen from the same browser.

I have to wait at least a month before Best Buy will let me print the certificate again, according to their telephone support.

So awesome. The process doesn’t feel all that polished and I’m not inclined to continue paying the annual $10 fee.”

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