Best Buy: Our Website Is Always Correct, You Must Be Wrong

When you find a discrepancy between the information on a retailer’s website and the information a product’s manufacturer prints on the package, who should you believe? Brie tells Consumerist that when she found such a discrepancy, Best Buy employees insisted that their site couldn’t possibly be wrong. The product packaging, they insisted, must be misprinted. Well, no.

The product in question is, of course, from Insignia, Best Buy’s house brand. Brie writes:

Oh Best Buy, this is why I hate shopping with you. I ordered this frame as a gift and chose the pick up in store option. Which albeit being the normal pain the pooper that is dealing with Best Buy (receipt checks anyone?) went rather smoothly. Until I got the frame back to the office. See the description for the frame states 2G of internal memory while the box says 1G.

I called Best Buy and spoke to one rep that was in the processes of trying to determine what happened since Insignia’s site had the same info (not surprising since Insignia is Best Buy exclusive), when my phone dropped the call (yay AT&T). I called back and spoke to a second rep whose answer was that I should call Insignia and tell them that “their box is wrong” since both Best Buy and Insignia had the memory listed at 2G. I explained to the rep that they probably share the same database since they are the SAME company when he said all he could do it to suggest I call them since “their site is correct”.

Honestly, I just wanted them to change the site, I’m a web minion by trade I know there is such a thing as a type, it happens and it is pretty damn easy to fix. Just take your finger and change the 2 to a 1, voila it is MAGIC!!! I finally called the store that I went to. They verified that their info had the memory listed at 2G and that they had 26 frames in stock. They went and looked at the boxes in person and low and behold, the boxes all had the same info. Their first thought was that the boxes were wrong because their site is always right ::bangs head on desk:: but finally they admitted that the site was probably more of a likely culprit then a packaging snafu.

All hail the all-powerful and all-knowing website, where no data entry error or typo has ever appeared!

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