eddiecanuck.com

*sigh*

Where to start. So I get online this morning to find I have 4 spams in my blog comments for various posts. Not a big deal, I looked at ‘em then deleted them. I’m just curious as to why someone would do that. I’ve had this site in a blog format for a couple years and have had to deal with all the spam that comes with it. At this point, with what is in place, the only way now for a spam comment to get onto this site is for the person to manually enter it in. I just have one question for you… “what the hell are ya doin’?”.

Are you doing this to get hits to your site (all 4 today were porn sites)? If so, is it working? Are you getting massive amounts of traffic? I find that hard to believe, especially since the spam is on the site for a day max before I notice it and delete it. So then why? It doesn’t slow down my site and it takes you longer to enter the comment than it does for me to do a mass delete of them. So again I go back to wondering why you do it. Boredom? Ignorance? Challange? I don’t know.

I do want to thank you for the recent list of comments though. They made me giggle. The one that says “It’s people like you that are wrong with this country”, and “I disagree with everything you say”. But the best one was “My Kung-fu is better than your kung-fu”. That one made me smile the biggest. Especially when I hit the delete button and it was gone. As a friend of mine recently said on his site when you posted the same thing, “why did you bring kung-fu to a gun fight?”. Have a nice day kids.

Wow, after my post I decided to hit the internet’s best friend Google. I typed in “best buy sucks” and hit enter. WHOLLY COW!!! You should see the results. The best in my opinion is www.bestbuysux.org. They not only have a HUGE list of customer complaints, but employee complaints as well. Looks like Best Buy doesn’t just ignore the customer. I also found a nice little tidbit about their return policy:

RETURN POLICY
did you all also know that even though the return policy on the back of the receipt says that you only have 30 days for exchanges or returns that you may have longer. best buy has to exchange or return any item, no matter if it is still within the 30 day period, as long as the item is within the manufacturers warrenty. best buy does not even tell thier customer service reps this. i found out from a source in upper management about this little hidden fact. so the next time you have an item that has a 90 day warrenty from the manufacturer and the 30 day return policy has expired you still can return it or exchange it and best buy can not tell you know. you can call the bbb and have them fined. not too many people know about this. the way i found out is that someone that worked for the bbb came in with this same situation and i was corrected and the ops manager confirmed it. i was told not to say anything but only to accomidate the bbb customer.

I just may have to try this out with my iPod.
I encourage EVERYONE to take a look at this site and think twice before shopping at Best Buy again.

I’ve been holding off on posting this for a while, not sure why, but I have. I guess I’m getting sick and tired of the absolute lack of customer service from businesses in the past year or so. The latest in a string of events happened with Best Buy. Up until recently I’ve gone to them for a lot of big ticket purchases as I felt they had decent prices for a local shop. As such my wife purchased an iPod for me for Christmas (GREAT gift). It worked great for about a month, then I noticed the battery life on it decreased dramatically (a common problem with iPods). To the point where it wouldn’t hold a charge over night. So I took it back to Best Buy. Box, accessories and all, and explained the situation. First thing they did was ask if I had purchased the service agreement. I said, well no, I didn’t purchase this… it was a gift. This was on 1/27/05. They told me that since it was past the 30 days that they couldn’t (wouldn’t) do anything for me. The guy then proceeded to tell me this is normal behavior. Excuse me? “No it isn’t” I told him. I happen to work with handheld devices that use Lithium batteries, and while they do deteriorate after a while, they definitely don’t do it after a month. I argued with them for several minutes, but in they end they blew me off and said there was nothing they could do, policy says 30 days. This is where I loose it. Apparently these rules are so hard fast that they cannot be bent by mere mortals for the sake of satisfying the customer. Apparently Best Buy doesn’t need to worry about pleasing customers so long as they can get your money and get you out the door as quickly as possible. Now overall this may not seem like a big deal but think about it. It’s 2 days after their 30 days, on an item that was a Christmas gift and they aren’t willing to just say “hey, we’ll take care of it”. It’s no sweat of their heads, they just RMA the item back to Apple and get their money back anyway. I guess the fact that I have spent literally thousands of dollars on merchandise from them means nothing. It’s all about the bottom dollar. Well thanks to that attitude they have lost me as a customer forever. I refuse to even buy a battery from them. And as for their service agreements, that is a whole different matter. I have a friend who is in the process of writing up his accounts with them and their service agreements on his own blog. I’ll link to it later. They are basically stringing him along on a laptop until his service agreement expires in a few months, then they won’t have to deal with it.
In my opinion Best Buy has grown so big that they have put processes in place that will ultimately lead to their downfall. They tell you they are not commision, but don’t tell you they get incentives for selling those service agreements. The agreements themselves are useless for any real issues that may come up. They are designed that way. They are so generally worded that they service department can talk their way out of any situation that requires them to replace an item. I’ve noticed in the past 2 month that there are 4 people where I work that have Best Buy “horror” stories, much more extreme than mine. I’m wondering if this is a growing trend or if it is something local.
How about you?? Do you have a Best Buy “horror” story? Care to share? Feel free to post a comment to this. In the mean time I’m working on a letter that I plan to send to the local store manager, the regional manager and to their corporate headquarters. Do I expect them to do anything about it? No, but who knows, they may surprise me. Besides, we as consumers need to stop putting up with absolute crap when it comes to customer service. Companies need to stand by the product they are selling. More to come I’m sure.

Update: Want a better story? My buddy’s posted his. Click here.

Well it’s official. From ESPN’s NHL site.

So the season is over and no body knows if there will be a season next year. What a bunch of crap. In the end they were 6.5 million apart from an agreement. Hell most of the players make more than that, so that’s one player’s salary for a year. And they couldn’t come to an agreement. After all this time the union finally caves in and says they’ll accept a cap. Why the hell couldn’t they have just accepted it last summer, or fall, or in December? All that time bluffing to finally be called on it. It’s crap that people (both players and owners) deal with that much money and can’t figure something out. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now. The players are out of work, what do they do for money?? Some are playing over seas in the European leagues. But with no immediate pressure or incentive to get this resolved, will it ever be done? Or will the players union go back to saying no cap? Guess we’ll just have to wait to find out.