The Chronic Consumer

I just read an article on Yahoo News today about a lawsuit filed against Best Buy. The lawsuit comes from the Connecticut Attorney General’s office and charges the nationwide electronics retailer with engaging in a so-called “bait-and-switch-plus” scheme.

Basically, the AG is saying that Best Buy lured customers into the store by advertising low prices on certain products, but then when the customer tried to purchase the product, they’d be told by employees that the actual price was higher. (Allegedly) the employees would check an “internal” website that looked very similar to the public Best Buy website. But the price on the internal website would be much higher. The employee would then show that price to the customer — a completely illegal practice.

Somehow this doesn’t surprise me. I hate dealing with Best Buy and have had lots of problems with them over the years regarding extended warranties and so forth. If it turns out that they’re guilty in this particular case, I’ll never buy anything from them again — no matter how low their prices are!!

The Amazon.com Gold Box has been around for quite some time. In it’s first incarnation, you clicked on the Gold Box at the upper right-hand corner of the Amazon.com page to view 10 different offers — one at a time. You could only accept one Gold Box offer per day, so if you passed on a particular deal, it was gone forever.

I’m not sure what happened to that version of the Gold Box. Maybe it wasn’t popular with users — or maybe it was so popular that Amazon.com decided to expand the offerings. At any rate, the Gold Box works differently now.

Instead of viewing offers one at a time, you get a featured Deal of the Day. This offer is not specifically geared towards you based on your past purchases (like the old Gold Box offers were), but are open to all Amazon.com users. Because there are limited quantities, you’re essentially “competing” with other shoppers to take advantage of the featured deal. This reminds me of Woot.com, actually.

Then there are also a bunch of other deals listed also. Unlike the Deal of the Day, these deals are ongoing, so you don’t necessarily have to make a purchase right then and there.

I like the new Gold Box setup better and have actually bought stuff from it, whereas I never bothered with the old Gold Box.

What did I buy? The complete Season Two DVD box set of Boston Legal for just $26.99. Pretty good deal!