Best Buy Customer Gets Box Full of Bathroom Tiles Instead of Hard Drive 990
The Consumerist is reporting that a Best Buy customer recently purchased a hard drive only to discover that the box contained six ceramic bathroom tiles instead of the Western Digital drive he had expected. The rub of it is Best Buy is refusing to grant a refund or exchange for the non-existent drive. "The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens. So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive and while I was checking the contents to ensure it was a hard drive this time, the store manager came up, took the box from me and said to take it up with the manufacturer. Now to my surprise, I argued with the guy saying that they have already accepted the return and I have now purchased the new one. He said I was shit out of luck. I followed up with the manufacturer today and they said they would get the complaint to the Best Buy Purchasing department. Best Buy corporate said that they stand by their manager's decision."
It happened before. (Score:5, Informative)
This reminds me so much of the story of someone I know who back in the mid-90s had a shrink wrapping machine. He bought a CD-ROM drive from some department store, took it home, took the CD-ROM drive out. Then he took a brick and placed it back in the CD-ROM box, srinkwrapped the box and then returned it to the store like it was unopened.
Now can you imagine what the next person who bought that had to go through?
So thisb fhf could just be a case of someone trying to trick Best Buy and trying to use a grass roots campaign scam Best Buy.
Chargeback (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback [wikipedia.org]
Granted it is only wikipedia, but it does list 'failure to issue a refund' as a reason for a chargeback.
You Americans and your Crazy Laws (Score:5, Informative)
If I buy something and it doesn't work, I take it back to the store and they replace it or repair it. They can then take it up with the manufacturer, or not: I don't care. Repair is a high-stakes game, because if trading standards believe that they're doing it to delay, or that the failure was unreasonable, they vendor has a problem. SoGA protection is a movable feast, but applies for at least a year.
sounds like what happened at target recently (Score:3, Informative)
When I was a Best Buy Manager ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where's the verification? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Retail theft, and not the kind you're thinking (Score:3, Informative)
I've done this 3 times (visa and/or mc - no amex). One time I won by default (the vendor never replied apparently), the second time I lost (vendor disagreed) but I got my money back anyway as a courtesy from the credit card company (it was a small transaction, less than $50 I think), and the third time I lost and did not get my money back (vendor disagreed, case closed). Each time I had to document my claim to the best of ability, it took months to come to a conclusion. From what I can tell the vendor has the upper hand in those investigations, NOT the consumer.
The credit card companies say that claim resolution is handled by Visa and/or Mastercard so they don't control the outcome (but they are profusely sorry) so threatening to cancel your account has no effect either.
Bottom line, it's not a very good situation to be in.
Re:sounds like what happened at target recently (Score:3, Informative)
The Retail Security Perspective (Score:2, Informative)
Here's how to handle this kind of situation (Score:4, Informative)
http://consumerist.com/consumer/customer-service/no-ipod-soap-210348.php [consumerist.com]
The switcheroo scam will never die (Score:2, Informative)
While Sega was selling the Genesis, guys would buy a complete system, take it home, remove the motherboard from the machine, reassemble it, and return it for a full refund. I would imagine that having to buy a pair of cheapo controllers, power supply, and a used copy of Sonic all for $30 beats buying the whole system for $119+ tax.
Sega, SNES, and Gameboy game carts were easily opened with tools you could buy from Parts Express. I worked at a second hand game store and we found a number of carts that had been returned had their innards pulled and replaced with "undesirable" roms like various Barbie and Jesus games.
While working at a Best Buy, we were finding that a series of open box hard drives were being returned because the capacity didn't match what was bought. 4.3GB hard drives were reporting 850MB or less, though their labels said otherwise.
72 pin and SDRAM were also being hijacked in a similar fashion. People were returning RAM saying that they had bought a 32MB stick but it was reporting only 4 or 8MB.
Then there was stuff like the aforementioned scam. We got all kinds of returns only to find bricks, tiles, rocks, and anything else you can imagine in place of radios, VCR's, speakers, etc (one CSR got stung by a guy who returned a set of "White Van" speakers in place of the Infinity's he bought). Most of my stores instituted a policy where items had to be inspected before they were accepted for returned, but they were really slow to do so with PC parts.
Re:Don't Shop at Best Buy? (Score:3, Informative)
But even more seriously, why should we trust the report. A box without a harddisk. What is to say the customer did not make the switch. It would be nice for Best Buy to allow a return, but how much money is lost in the process? How much cheaper could the prices be if they did not allow such returns? Again, small shops have allowed me to return such products. I wouldn't expect large shops to so do.
Digging even deeper, we see the problem. Someone bought the hard disk, replaced the contents, resealed it, and returned it. This wasn't wrong because they were not ripping off someone who could afford it. I know this happens. I have heard first stories of how people do this. They get away with it if they don't do it too often. Of course what happens is a regular joe buys the missing product, and gets screwed. Big box stores process so many returns, and have so little to lose with fraudulent returns, that they just don't check. If a customer get screwed, there are a million of others to replace that lost sale. Smaller guys do care, and do check, and will often take responsibility. Another reason not to shop there.
About the only reason to shop at Best Buy is to get a low price, or in anticipation of making a fraudulent return.
Re:It happened before (Score:5, Informative)
To use your analogy, if you showed me a picture of Tower Bridge, and delivered the London Bridge, (Yes, even though I am an America, I do understand the difference.
The issue here isn't that the store refused the return. The took the return. The real issue is that after the guy bought a real (presumably) function hard drive, the manager of the store approached the customer, and seized his property. That is robbery.
Re:It happened before. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It happened before. (Score:3, Informative)
Re-read the original FA. The return and refund had already occurred. He bought another of the same model drive and opened it in front of the store employees to make sure that he hadn't bought another box of tiles. It was at that point that the manager came up and stole from the customer what his store had just sold to the customer.
Re:It happened before (Score:2, Informative)
At CompUSA we never took back *any* returns until we had verified what was in the box. On top of that, we always required a drivers license or valid photo ID. I vaguely recall returning something to Best Buy once and them requiring the same information. If they are not taking that info, they are not doing their jobs correctly.
Which, in the U.S., the way some people behave, is not necessarily surprising.
THE CUSTOMER IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It happened before. (Score:3, Informative)
Not commission. (Score:3, Informative)
I happen to have worked at a Best Buy in the past (briefly, mind you... my manager and I had a disagrement about the best way to serve the customers' needs - I wanted to explain things to them so they could make an informed decision, he wanted them to buy things based on purchase price).
I have no idea what management gets paid, or what their incentive plans might include. I do know that the blue-vested people you see wandering around in the aisles ignoring customers are paid not much more than minimum wage, regardless of the speed at which inventory fails to fly off the shelves.
Re:It happened before (Score:3, Informative)
Commercial shrink-wrap sealers necessary to make a product look like its never been opened are not cheap in comparison to the price of a hard disk. I think it's much more likely that a store employee stole the hard disk and re-wrapped it using the store's own sealer -- which I'm sure every Best Buy has in their warehouse -- rather than the customer. On top of which, retail stores have insurance to cover big losses and figure a certain amount of theft and fraud into the mark-up on sales. Unless they have some reason to suspect this customer is a repeat offender, their treatment was very short-sighted. I doubt that this customer will ever return to Best Buy when its time to buy that $3,000 HDTV (or the $100 HDMI cable, $120 home theater power filter and all the other overpriced crap BB tries to pile on a sale). And, over time, that will cost BB more than the $100 write-off against taxes that they would have encountered.