Have you ever found a deal at Best Buy’s website only to travel to the store and find that the “sale” is over? Did the Best Buy employee show you “proof” on their “website”? It now seems that there are really TWO websites, and they’re identical except for the prices. Here’s the deal:

• You walk into a Best Buy to purchase a sale item you saw on their site.

• The employee tells you that the item is no longer on sale, and shows you what looks to be Best Buy’s website, but it’s really a secret intranet that Best Buy’s corporate office denies exists. The price on the website shows that the sale is over.

• You cry and leave, then at home you see that the sale isn’t over at all. What happened?

The Hartford Courant investigated this phenomenon throughly and are convinced the secret “intranet” exists. Their columnist actually saw it:

Many employees I talked with said they had no idea there is an internal site. But two employees at two different stores confirmed to me that there is an intranet site available only to employees.

One long-time employee showed me the intranet site Hammer and I had been led to believe was the bestbuy.com site.

The salesman told me it was a site that only employees could access because it contained confidential information as well as item prices.

Moral of the story? Bring a printout of BestBuy.com and also ask for the secret intranet price to be quoted to you. Sometimes it’s more, but sometimes it’s less.—MEGHANN MARCO

Computer Purchase Reveals Website Confusion [Hartford Courant]

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