May 25th, 2007
Best Buy Faces Possible Suit Over Deceptive Intrastore Website
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
You may recall my earlier story about Best Buy and the differences between its intrastore website, which it would often show customers to “prove” a sale didn’t exist, and its normal web site. At the time the Connecticut Attorney General was investigating, and it seems he’s looked long enough.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal accused Best Buy of “bait and switch” tactics and sent a complaint to the company on May 18. If no response is received by June 13, Blumenthal said he intends to file suit against the company.
The complaint asks Best Buy to refund money to consumers, as well as pay penalities and court costs, among other remedies. Additionally, the retailer must agree to stop the practice altogether. Source: BetaNews
We Say: I’m glad to see the AG taking some action. While I can see an online-only special being different on the intranet site, what Best Buy employees were doing was bringing up the internal site, saying it was the external one, and showing the sale to be over. That’s different, and definitely deceptive.
T says:
You are absolutely right - it is employees mis-representing the intranet website. The company as a whole has that in place to reflect store pricing, but some greedy jerkoff (probably pressured by his bosses in corporate to improve sales) decided to do this to help keep margins up.
The store I worked at didn’t do that while I was there, but the company took a definite down-turn in its quality of management during the couple years I was there.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:16 am
jason says:
im just glad to see best buy being shown for their lies and deception
May 25th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Calvin says:
This news about Best Buy using the bait and switch tactic has gone much further back than people realize. I used to work in a Dallas-area Best Buy 5 years ago and we were taught as associates to use the method (although it was never called “bait-n-switch” for obvious reasons) to upsell customers to bring in more revenue and inflate numbers. I was told by my supervisor on one occasion that we would explain to our customer how we didn’t have the computer he was looking for, but the next closest store that had it was over an hour away. My supervisor’s intent was to upsell the computer package even though we did indeed have in stock the computer he was looking for.
All these types of actions I saw when working there from 2002 - 2003, and I would hate to think how far back it went before that.
May 25th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Ali says:
About 6 months ago, I bought something from Best Buy (a DVD, I think). They tried charging me about $4 more than the BestBuy.com site — it was on sale on the website. When I asked them about it, the cashier went to look it up on the (in-store) website and told me it was not on sale. I thought, well, maybe somehow I made a mistake. When I went home later, I checked it on the website and sure enough it was still on sale for a cheaper price. Of course, by then, I didn’t want to waste my time and gas for the car to go back for the refund they owed me. This was only a few bucks, but just think if they pull that on lots of their customers — the revenue would add up.
May 25th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Mark says:
I’m a bit confused by all of this. I’ve always understood that 1) Best Buy’s “external” Web site has different pricing from what’s in the stores and 2) that the “internal” Web site accessible from within Best Buy stores lists pricing specific to a store at that particular time. Similarly, if one goes to the Best Buy site and views the weekly print ad, one is shown (via zip code) the ad that applies to a given locale–for which different products might be on sale at different prices, based on local market conditions.
And so, it’s not deceptive to say that a product _in a given store_ is not on sale, even if it’s on sale at BestBuy.com. That seems perfecly reasonable to me.
This post does acknowledge that, and goes on to say that workers in a store were pointing to the “internal” Web site and claiming that it’s the “external” site, which would be deceptive (although, in a given employee’s case, it might be simply misinformed).
The comments so far, though, don’t seem to be in the same vein.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to imply that, based on this information, Best Buy has been engaging in systematic bait-and-switch or any other illegal tactic. I certainly haven’t experienced this–whenever I’ve asked the question, Best Buy employees have pointed out that BestBuy.com is independent from the retail stores.
May 26th, 2007 at 11:44 am
ej says:
Best Buy is a very sneaky and deceptive retailer. Another low down thing they do is give you a reward instead of a cash rebate for high ticket items. I got $200 on my rewards cards for a HDTV and this award expired without me knowing it. I am out $200.
May 29th, 2007 at 6:36 am