I'm an avid reader of The Consumerist and it seems that a favorite pastime of theirs (or their readers) is to completely bash Best Buy and it's incompetent employees. Now I'll agree that some of their services like The Geek Squad are terrible and considering you don't need many qualifications in order to get a job there they don't always have the most knowledgeable employees, however I wouldn't go as far as to say that every employee at every Best Buy is an incompetent moron.
My co-workers and I have been going to Best Buy store #318 (you can figure out the town if you really want to kn0w) for years now on Tuesdays to check out the latest DVD releases among other things and have never had any problem. In fact we've had the opposite of problems, we've had exceptional service and extremely friendly employees. Now I get that we've been going there religiously on Tuesdays for probably 5-6 years now and we've gotten to know a couple of the managers and a couple of the employees pretty well, but I can't recall being treated unfairly at any point. And we're not always the type of customers that just go in, grab something and buy it, we are sometimes a pain in the ass. Every purchase we make, whether it's DVD's, video games, TV's, etc, we always price match a competitor. I can't recall the last time I've paid exactly what Best Buy wanted me to and sometimes those prices are way below what Best Buy has advertised, but again, we've never had a problem. In fact, we've even had employees take the time to look up a competitor's price on the in house computers to make sure that we are getting the best price possible.
On top of little things like that, my co-worker has been looking at a new TV for months now, but just can't seem to pull the trigger. We go in every week and look at TVs hoping to see that price drop that will sway him towards actually making the purchase and even though he continues to look and not buy, nobody has every harassed him or tried to push a TV on him. And actually the manager has offered to reduce the price of certain TVs by as much as $150 at times without even asking. And along that note, none of the employees have been overly pushing about the service plans either. A couple weeks ago I took advantage of the $150 Insignia Blu-Ray player (I needed wireless, but otherwise it would have been $99) and the guy asked one time if I wanted the service plan, when I said no he dropped it entirely. And actually, with this purchase, customer service went above and beyond. I didn't notice this deal until Wednesday, which is obviously after our normal Tuesday visit at which point I had bought the Transformers 2 blu-ray not knowing that I could have purchased the Blu-Ray player and gotten transformers for $4.99. So I brought that Wednesday we went in and I bought the blu-ray player and asked about the Transformers 2 deal, but of course I didn't have my receipt on me from the day before. The guy at customer service looked up my receipt, printed it out, did a return of tuesday's Transformers 2, put the blu-ray player and Transformers 2 on the same receipt to get me the $4.99 price. Now the only problem was I was using a reward zone coupon to get the blu-ray player for so cheap and apparently it wasn't good with any other offer or promo, so I was out of luck on the $4.99 Transformers 2, but even though it made it a little bit of a problem for the CS rep, it didn't bother him in the least bit, he was happy to help me try to save a few dollars.
So I know that Best Buy has a bad reputation when it comes customer service, whether it's the Geek Squad not knowing what they are doing or opening computers and "optimizing" them and jacking up the price, but I can honestly say that I've had a very pleasant experience at this local Best Buy and will continue to stop in every Tuesday until I no longer live around here, or The Chief gets fired. So thanks again to the employees of store #318, we appreciate the service.
