Late last night, Best Buy posted what seemed like the greatest Black Friday in July deal ever: a $200 gift card for only $15. This was an obvious pricing error, but humans are humans, and people were willing to put up with an Isaac Mizrahi-designed floral gift card if it meant that they would get $185 in free money. Fortunately for Best Buy, they corrected the pricing error after only a few hours.

As we’ve explained over and over as recently as three months ago, retailers are not legally bound to honor pricing errors, especially completely obvious ones like this. They might choose to, but are under no obligation to do so. Also, they might place a hold on your credit or debit card or even a gift card, but that does not mean that your order has been accepted.

It’s been a tense day on the thread on the Reddit thread where news of this deal spread as people wait to find out whether their orders went through.

Whether taking advantage of pricing errors is ethical or not is up to you, but people in the order processing department probably noticed that something was up when people started ordering fistfuls of cards. Best Buy is no stranger to disastrous (for them) deals that involve gift cards, but at least this time the transactions didn’t take place at physical stores and the gift cards were for their own stores, not other retailers.

Best Buy Is [Update: Was] Selling $200 Gift Cards for $15 [Gizmodo]
[Deals] Bestbuy $15 for $200 error [Gizmodo]

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