How I almost got scammed by Best Buy
So Laura and I wanted to buy a TV recently. We’d been meaning to get a nice shiny HDTV for a while, and when I screwed up my W-4 withholding and ended up with a large tax return, it was the perfect opportunity. We looked around online and in stores, and settled on a nice Sharp LCD.
Unsurprisingly, the best prices were online, but Best Buy’s website showed a fairly close price and wouldn’t need a week or so to ship it to us. So after a bit of dithering, we traipsed down to the local Best Buy to pick one up, since their site claimed that store had the thing in stock.
When we got there, the price wasn’t what we expected — suddenly it was $200 higher than it’d been the previous night online. We complained to a salesman, who assured us that their sales end Sunday morning. That seemed a bit odd, but we had no reason not to trust him, especially since he showed us the online price, and it matched what the store offered. We resisted his pressure to buy the thing and wandered off, hunting around through different stores and finally finding the right price at Circuit City. Things happen, we thought, and we should have been quicker about buying the TV when we saw the online price.
Turns out I shouldn’t have been so trusting about the “see, it’s the same price online” maneuver:
Best Buy Confirms It Has Secret Website
March 2, 2007
Under pressure from state investigators, Best Buy is now confirming my reporting that its stores have a secret intranet site that has been used to block some consumers from getting cheaper prices advertised on BestBuy.com.
After reading that article, I looked at Best Buy’s site, and surprisingly enough the sale hadn’t ended. They’re still showing the price I originally expected, $200 less than what the store tried to charge us.
Suddenly it’s feeling a lot less innocent — Laura pointed out that in the store, we didn’t actually see the salesman navigate to ‘www.bestbuy.com’, but just click on a bookmark in a browser with a hidden address bar. Gosh, I wonder why they might be hiding the address bar. Certainly couldn’t be because their bookmark leads to the internal clone site, right?
The article’s right — the clone site looks exactly like Best Buy’s external site, flashy graphics and ads and all. It’s not even remotely like an inventory list like their spokesman tried to claim.
At this point I’m pretty convinced they were trying to rip me off with the internal site, and I don’t plan to ever buy anything from them again. I suggest you don’t either.