Best Buy Admits Secret Web Site-can block customers from getting the lowest prices

[The Straight Story]

Best Buy Admits Secret Web Site

United Press International

U.S. consumer-electronics giant Best Buy Inc. has a secret Web site that can block customers from getting the lowest prices, a published report said Friday.

A company spokesman who first denied its existence acknowledged it was real after being contacted by the Connecticut attorney general, The Hartford (Conn.) Courant reported.

Best Buy is cooperating fully with the attorney general's investigation, spokesman Justin Barber said.

When in-store customers inform Best Buy sales people of a cheaper price on BestBuy.com, they can be shown an internal Web site, which looks identical to the public Web site but does not always show the lowest price, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said.

Best Buy of Minneapolis insisted its policy was to give customers the best price.

http://www.kget.com/business/story.aspx?content_id=9d862420-c4ab-4015-b110-a0a7f1c6a2aa

[asthmaticeog]

1. Classy.

Is it really cheaper to build, maintain and update a phony site than to just give the few customers who even ask a buck off a spindle of CDRs or whatever? How assholish.

[LTR]

2. My experience is that Best Buy employees do use the web to search inventory

I was looking for a DVD around Xmas and the clerk went online to search other stores' inventory.

This is a function that I don't think is available at the official site. The layout was slightly different as well.

I don't think the intent of their internal site was to scam people out of a few bucks. It seems to me as if they use the internal site for inventory lookup and other things. And since it appears to be the same site as the regular one, employees probably use it by default.

[JohnnyRingo]

6. After giving this some thought and after posting my own experience below

I think it is a scam.
Many, but not most people check online for the lowest price before going to the store for something over $100.

Best Buy must maintain lower sale prices there to lure those shoppers away from Circuit City. That's what happened to me when shopping for a sub woofer.

When the shopper goes to the store the scanned (scammed?) sale price is higher than listed at Bestbuy.com. Most consumers would just pay the higher price assuming the sale is no longer valid or that they were mistaken.

In my case, I just visited the site an hour before going to the store and knew better, so I took the sales personnel to a monitor where a similar site showed the sale price as $10 higher, just as scanned. Apparently nothing could be done, but when I had the salesperson type in the site manually, the lower price was shown in what appeared to be an identical site.

The scam, as I see it, comes in those who don't check the website before going to the store and unwittingly pay a higher sale price than advertised online. The deception is compounded when the consumer tries to validate the online sale price through an instore terminal and is assured they are "wrong".

It seems particularly deceptive that they maintain a different site instore that seems to deny the prices shown at Bestbuy.com for those who do their homework online before shopping.

By the way, they did finally honor the advertised price, but had to type it into the register manually ensuring that the barcode database remained unchanged for future customers.

[JohnnyRingo]

3. Wow!..I think that happened to me last fall

I found a subwoofer online at a sale price.
When I went to the store, the price at the register was $20 higher than advertised.
Instead of paying the scanned price, I took a salesperson to a monitor to have him look up the web site.

The higher price was listed there, and though I was baffled I had him enter the address exactly as I recalled it.

Lo and behold, there was an almost identical site that listed the price as I found it at home.
Even the sales rep was puzzled as to why there were two web sites with different pricing, but at my insistence, they honored the sale by entering it manually.

[LeftyMom]

4. I'd believe it.

I worked for them for about a year, and they were the cheapest bastards I've ever encountered, always looking for a way to get more work out of fewer underpaid employees.

[blueknight]

5. dirty rotten bastards!

best buy is the the perfect personification of the bush administration. fuck the little guy, and if he complains, fuck him again!.go to bestbuysucks.com you will read horror stories how these rotten bastards treat their customers.

[Puregonzo1188]

7. Are you sure bestbuysucks.com is the right link?

The site I copied and pasted it, and well I don't think it was what you were talking about.

[asthmaticeog]

8. http://www.bestbuysux.org/

Edit: I removed "nt" from the header because it looked like part of the URL. Oops.

[Deja Q]

9. The cretins don't even hire knowledgeable people...

Seems I have two letters to write tonight...

[Alexander]

10. Richard Blumenthal is awesome.

He really should run for governor. I'm convinced he'd win.

Then again, he wouldn't be able to be Atty. Gen. if he did that.

[depakid]

11. Consumer Fraud could be curtailed

with large enough fines and jail time for management- which are the only things abusive corporations understand.