Saturday, August 15, 2009

Well, it was worth a shot

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It's 6am in the morning. You roll over to the nightstand to shut off the alarm on your Blackberry. While doing so you check your email. There's a message with the title Samsung 52" LCD $9.99. You wipe the cold from your eyes cuz obviously you're still in some kinda haze. You look again. It still says Samsung 52" LCD $9.99. That's nine dollars & ninety nine cents for a LCD that's easily 2 G's. You set the Blackberry down, grab your laptop and access your email from there. In the email there a link to Best Buy where the TV is being sold. You click the link and this is what you see.

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What do you do now??? I'll tell you what you do. You grab your credit card and you order that joint. That's what you do!!!!

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Once you get to the shopping cart you realize that this is indeed the case. Pick a delivery date and put the order through. Why wouldn't you?

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Once you get here the process has been completed. Within 3 minutes you receive an email confirming your order and the date of delivery. Now you have to sit back and wait.... and wait... and wait... and wait cuz you know that it's too good to be true. Then you think to yourself, why not share the deal with friends? So you log onto Facebook and post the link for all your folks. Get dressed and hit the office as usual. While at your PC in the office you decide to Google to see if anyone else has seen the deal. Bam!!! There's a ton of articles already on the Best Buy miscue. Welp, that pretty much seals up the fact that the order is going to be cancelled. It was just a matter of time. Around 3pm that afternoon, the email arrived.


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Now, I'm no fool. I didn't honestly at any point in time think that Best Buy would honor this thing. Hell, they need to fire their web development team or whatever web master screwed that one up. I mean it wasn't even a decimal point off. The price of the Samsung LCD is $1,999.99, so someone was really asleep at the wheel.

I was one of thousands who ordered it and figured "What the heck, I'll give it a shot". I guess what shocked me was how long it took Best Buy to react to the mistake and to correct the issue. They're a major retail company and there's no excuse for why they couldn't have almost immediately discovered this and at least removed the item from the website completely and then taken time to address whatever technical bugs they had. All major retailer have some sort of Terms of Conditions that protect them from mistakes like this one. Anyone who really thought that they'd honor this is living in a dream world. Imagine what would happen to their profits. Think about the shareholders would be going ballistic about the snafu.

Right or wrong, mistake or not, they still left a really bad taste in the mouths of their customers. They received a ton of press coverage on this mistake. If anything it gave them a commercial that they didn't even have to pay for. Talk about a PR spin. You screw up on your website by offering a $2,000 LCD for ten bucks. You then revoke the deal from consumers because of an error and then you get on the news all day. I wonder if they planned this. Honestly though, Best Buy should do something for the folks who ordered the TV's. I'm not saying to give folks a TV for that ridiculous price. But they just outright canceled the orders via email and nothing else. How about giving your customers 10% off their next visit. Maybe a gift card of some denomination for the hassle. Anything to shine a brighter light on the image of a company that stood in the dark shadows that day. But hey, we see how they handle business. They're like every other company out here that doesn't really care whether they lose a customer or not. Business for them will be brisk especially since the departure of Circuit City from the competitive marketplace.

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To be honest, I'm not really a Best Buy customer anyway. It's not bitterness speaking honestly. I truly don't get my electronics from them. Those who know me are aware that I purchase high dollar items and tend to look at Best Buy as the 7-Eleven of electronics stores. It's a Mom & Pop joint. They have a little bit of everything and the best of nothing. I'm a Myer-Emco kinda guy. A cat who'll order from companies direct or through reps I know personally. So all in all, there's no loss. I mean, Best Buy sells HDMI cables for a hundred bucks, why would the TV be $10??? LOL!!! Just imagine how much the warranty would've been on that? Nevermind, that would've been dumb. You could've just ordered 10 more TV's. With shipping that would've been about $800 for 8 52" Samsung TV's.

I got a $100 Best Buy gift card from a client around Christmas time. I didn't even use it until May. I walked around the store for like 90 minutes, no joke. I couldn't figure out what to get. Wanna know what I ended up getting? I'm glad you asked. I bought a very expensive toaster, ceramic stove cleaner, stainless steel wipes and the Stevie Wonder's Live at Last: A Wonder Summer's Night from London DVD. I groove to the Stevie Wonder joint. You gotta cop that. Guess Best Buy is good for something after all.... *shrugs*

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Peace & Love...

G. Mo

2 Comments:

Blogger BK said...

I'm with you.. I tried.. they sent me the same sorry arse email.. least they could do was give you some type of courtesy discount or something.. I was never a fan of them anyway.. overpriced.. I like that.. WORST BUY

8/15/2009 10:47 AM  
Blogger Harold of Scaggsville said...

Hey, you gotta try. I bet if they had caught the mistake soon enough and there were only 50 people, they may have eaten it and ridden the PR hype. Problem is they were still asleep at the wheel and probably let 1000's of those joints go through. J.B. in Shipping was probably like, "Man, these things selling like hotcakes, I better get me one."

They should've given a nice gift card or something.

8/20/2009 8:48 PM  

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