Lawsuit: Best Buy lies

Not the first time Best Buy has engaged in consumer fraud. There was the scam where, when buying a computer, they asked if you wanted the free trial of MSN. Then MSN charged the credit card number provided by Best Buy, even though one did not sign onto MSN. I understand some state Attorneys General (but not our Lisa) brought charges under state Deceptive Business Practices Acts. In my case, I used self help in that I called Microsoft about 9 times (and also tried to stop the charge on my credit card) and ended up calling them liars before they finally gave me a credit.*

Because of that, I bought my next computer at Circuit City, not realizing that they had fired their good help and left the store to the pimply faced guy from the Simpsons. However, the messes caused by him were eventually cleared up too.

Circuit City is out of business, basically leaving only Best Buy in that niche, but as far as I am concerned, Best Buy can go out of business, too. More work for the bankruptcy bar.

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*Why is Customer Service an oxymoron these days?

Alright, some clarification about the alleged internal "fraud" website:
I am a former employee of Best Buy, and I was around when this site went up.

The website...
- is a site available only on the BBY intranet.
- does look exactly like bestbuy.com.
- is aimed at use by in-store customers.
- is not used to enforce an "Anti-Price Matching Policy".

Before I go any further, there is no such "Anti-Price Matching Policy" in place, period. Now, some context for the website in question:

As with many retailers, the national website's prices can, and do, differ from in-store prices at times. The prices of product can also differ from one brick-and-mortar store to the next. While on the topic, in select instances, the prices listed on a retailer's national website may differ from user-to-user depending on the geographical location of the user's computer (determined by IP address). Granted, I have never found an instance where Best Buy's site was different in this particular way, but it certainly is possible, so I mentioned it.

Understand also that there are instances where the in-store price for a product is less than the online price. With that in mind, you could imagine that many customers in the store get on the kiosks to check the online price and compare it to the physical shelf tags for products in the store. Everyone with me? This making sense so far? You are a customer and you want to see both prices, because you don't know whether the online price or the in-store price is the best deal.

Best Buy got feedback from employees and customers that there is a lot of legwork involved doing this physical-to-online price comparison. To attempt to make this process less time-consuming, corporate Best Buy launched the first version of the intranet-only "BestBuy.com" site. It's purpose was to supply the users of the kiosks with all the in-store prices of everything. It looks identical to the national site, with one exception: There is a large notice in huge font near the top of the site stating that this is NOT the national website, and it lists the IN-STORE prices only.

READ: The intranet site is similar to the national site to make it easy to find the same product(s) on BOTH sites, for comparison.
READ: The national site is still available on the kiosk, and is clearly labelled.

The whole point to this intranet site is to allow a customer to do all their pricing research without leaving the kiosk, thus saving time. It also saves time for employees, who would otherwise be doing some of that legwork with the customer. The intranet site is a good thing for all parties here. That being said, there was a problem... please read on:

Although the site provided a reduced-legwork way of checking in-store prices, there were still two separate websites which needed to be researched to get the answer to the question, "What's the best price?". This was cumbersome as well, due to the the fact that the kiosks did not allow multitasking, so one had to switch between the national website and the internal website repeatedly. Another problem, is that it is apparently not human nature to read *everything* on the screen, and thus it is entirely possible that a customer might not be aware of the fact there there are TWO versions of the site and that BOTH ARE AVAILABLE, despite large-font notices and visible links to both. So, corporate Best Buy responded to this observation by...

Releasing version two of the intranet site. What they did was re-tool the intranet site to display the lowest price between the in-store and online prices for every product. They STILL maintained the giant banner, indicating that the user is visiting an intranet, kiosk-only site, AND continue to make available the national website right on the same kiosks. So, the meat of the class-action lawsuit is baseless, especially considering that it has been filed so recently, and the newer version of the intranet site has been up for quite a long time (it feels like it's been at least a year or maybe two, but I can't remember for sure).

Granted, I know that the employees and management in a particular store can say and do things that would contradict the documents/resources/trainings that corporate puts on internally, but I can confidently say that no such 'fraud' or other shenanigans occurred in the stores I worked at, and corporate has nothing to do with it. This may be difficult to believe for some, but working as a non-commissioned employee, without a meaningful bonus system, and a huge corporate Human Resources department to fall back on (no fear of 'retaliation' by management), there was no incentive for employees to scam customers. Another fact, when Circuit-City went under, some of their former employees got hired in to Best Buy, and many of those individuals had to get "re-trained" at sales because they were spewing falsehoods to increase sales, and that does not fly. (Note: I understand -- the same rules apply everywhere, and I'm sure corporate Circuit City did not *train* employees to do this)

I no longer work at Best Buy, but for those that inevitably wish to know, I worked in two West-Michigan stores for 5 years in the computer sales and Geek Squad areas, left recently on good terms (better job), and was very well-respected by other employees, management, and customers too.

I know it's easy to get high-strung about big business, but not everyone is out to get you in retail.