Best Buy, ugh!

Best Buy, the giant retailer, is engaged in a program to stop customers from figuring out how to beat the system and score good stuff cheap and to focus on what they have identified as ideal customers. What they have done is put draconian procedures in place sure to piss me off. The lovely Mrs. Sneed has been wishing for a flat panel TV for the bedroom, one that can be mounted on the wall. This would eliminate a giant piece of furniture that hold the current TV. The current TV is a huge black box, weighing so much that it could anchor a large ship. I nearly maimed myself hauling it to Goodwill yesterday. Being the terrific fellow that I am, I hustled to the Best Buy store near my work and bought a 40" Samsung HD LCD set. The salesperson who sold it to me was knowledgeable and very attentive, ushering me from place to place with a dazzling array of stuff that I need to fully appreciate my soon-to-be new set. She was oh so helpful, that is, until I paid. Only then did I learn that she had a short-term memory problem, at least with respect to me. She told me that she was going back to the warehouse to tag a set with my name so that I could come back after work to pick it up. She also said that she had just been back there for another customer and there were 5 units of the model I needed. After work I went back to get it. As I walked into the store, my salesperson came out. I greeted her and said, "I'm comng for my TV set." She look at me, trying to figure out ho I was and finally asked me what set I was getting. When I reminded her, she said that she was just going to call me, because all three of the sets that they had on hand had been sold and that mine would not be in the store until Saturday, the 16th. What happened to the story about five sets? On Saturday I called the store to confirm that my set was in. It was, so the lovely Mrs. Sneed and I went over after lunch. After some discussion we decided that the 40" set was too big, so I went and found the same salesperson who sold it to me to so that we could change to a smaller version. She had no recollection of having sold it to me, or the discussion we had in front of the store about when it would be in. She did concede that my face looked familiar, but she chuckled, I see a lot of customers. We decided on a smaller set, she got it from the back room but when they tried to cancel the old order and ring up the new, the system told them that I had already picked it up. The cashier, the saleperson and the manager all asked me if I was sure I didn't have the set. I was pretty sure. This necessitated a box-to-box search of the warehouse to find the box with my name on it. This was the only way that they would believe that I hadn't already picked up the set. These darn shifty eyes always do me in. Included in our purchase was a high definition DirecTV receiver, which was to be shipped to our house by the 18th, today. When I got home tonight, the UPS man had left a box on the porch. Rather than being the receiver, it was another TV set. Not the really good flat panel set that I had purchased, but another set none the less. I must admit that at this point, had it been the same as the one I bought, I would have kept it and my mouth shut. But since it was a cheap set, I figured I better call them. I called the 800 number on my order form and was told that they could have UPS pick it up, but that it would result in an internal investigation as to how the TV was shipped rather than the DirecTV box and that this would hold up the order for some time. Their advice was to take the TV to the store and let them figure it out. Tonight my younger son and I did just that. This resulted in the return clerk, the head return clerk, the operations lead (whatever that is) and the store manager all standing around scratching their collective heads and trying to figure out what to do. Eventually, they said they reordered the receiver and they took the errant TV set, but I'm sure they will screw up again before this is done. I will soon be at the store trying to prove to them that I didn't get my receiver. Jackasses, the bane of my existence. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor