eddiecanuck.com

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005 at 4:46 pm and is filed under General Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.