Does Best Buy purposely overcharge?
May 24th, 2007 by 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!!
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Shopping News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 6th, 2007 at 9:52 am
It must just be certain Best Buys. I don’t shop there very often, as I can’t afford that kind of stuff very often, but whenever I’ve been there, everything is priced the same as it is everywhere else. But I am dissatisfied with their Geek Squad, which I’m going to be posting about if I ever get my site running right again. Grrrr.
June 6th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Yeah, I’ve never personally experienced the whole bait-and-switch thing, but like I said in the post, I haven’t had particularly pleasant dealings with the store either.
I completely avoid them now. I find that most of the stuff they sell can be purchased at Amazon.com for much less anyway.
July 3rd, 2007 at 3:04 pm
[...] without a specialized background – real world reviews for the kind of things we buy every day. Her store review warning about possible deceptive advertising practices warned me away from Best Buy a few weeks ago [...]
July 31st, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Always check amazon.com before buying at Best Buy – usually, the same item is FAR cheaper on amazon.com. In these days of easy internet access and low shipping fees for online shopping, it is really silly to overpay at Best Buy.