One of the top most awesome reasons to work in retail is for the sweet, sweet employee discounts. But we’re hearing rumblings from some of our friends inside Best Buy that changes to the employee discount are making them sad. Blue, even.

One unnamed employee explained the changes:

Now we don’t always get along, the Consumerist and Best Buy associates. In fact after Comcast and the TSA, I think we may be your biggest villans. But we’re looking for help from you to publicize an issue that we’re really fired up about, a change to our employee discount.

See, Best Buy associates get all products for cost+5% and anyone who works in electronic retail knows that means we don’t get a heck of a lot of money off many things but we get a steal on accessories like cables. We have the convenience of buying say a USB extension cable for 70 cents instead of the appalling 30.00 we charge for it. Now despite constantly saying Best Buy is stronger than ever in these trying times Best Buy has decided to gouge employees by limiting the discount maximum to 50% off, so BBY will make a cool $14.30 off of us.

Now I get that we’re complaining about something that most non-employees could care less about but its the principle. They didn’t like the game so they changed the rules halfway through and now we have to buy our cables at Monoprice.com, which of course I’ll be recommending to all customers. Best Buy’s argument is that these products actually have a real cost above the fixed price they were purchased at when including things like research and development. Hilarious, I was unaware Best Buy developed the HDMI cable. I know that many jaded readers don’t think much of Best Buy but I know I’m trying to get the word out that the moment you start taking not just employees souls but from your employees pockets you’re failing.

And at the very least I figured you could get a laugh at our misfortune. Who doesn’t enjoy schadenfreude?

Well, we don’t like to see employees suffer, and it sounds like this discount program is one of the few things that helps Best Buy attract employees who actually know what an HDMI cable does.

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