Dear Best Buy:
Last year, for the first time in over a decade, I entered your store and made a purchase. I had decided not to shop at Best Buy after disastrous customer service in the past, but my wife insisted that your company would have the best buy on TVs and, well, you did. Through a series of coincidences, I also came in to possession of a $100 Best Buy gift card and a coupon for 40% the purchase of a GPS. This coupon, incidentally, I discovered while geocaching with a friend in Frontenac State Park. There was an entire book of Best Buy GPS coupons, along with a flyer explaining that Best Buy was working with the State Park system to encourage geocaching (and requesting that each individual only take one coupon).
Needless to say, I was exciting. I enjoy geocaching but, lacking a GPS, I either have to go with a friend that does have a GPS or try to locate the caches via print-outs (not terribly successful).
So, in September, I went in to the Eagan Best Buy. Neither of the two employees who I spoke with that day even knew what geocaching was. They were thus unable to answer my questions about the various GPSs. I asked if they could show me how one particular model worked and, after pressing random buttons for five minutes, the employee said: “Well, these are new, so we haven’t been trained on them yet”. I left without buying anything.
I searched online for the models that I felt would work best and then visited the Maple Grove location. The employee who approached me also had no idea what geocaching was. I showed him print-outs of the two GPSs I liked best and told me that the store did not have them in stock. I asked him if another store in the area had one of the GPSs, and he shrugged his shoulders. So I asked him to show me a comparable model. He claimed ignorance and told me to wait for another employee. He went over to that employee (who was busy with other customers) and told him to help me next. After waiting ten minutes, I left the store empty-handed once again.
A few days later, my wife, who decided to buy a GPS for me for Christmas, visited the Mall of America location. They didn’t have the GPSs, either, and they were incapable of suggesting a similar model to my wife, saying that since the GPSs were new, they’d had little training on how to use them.
Two weeks before Christmas, I stopped at the Roseville location. The employee informed me that his store did not have either of the GPSs (which I found at Best Buy’s website) either. He knew how to look up the availability and told me that no store in the region had the GPSs in stock. (I could have ordered the GPSs on-line, but the coupon was only good for in-store purchases.) I asked him if he could suggest a comparable model, but, after playing around with a few GPSs for 15 minutes, declared that he lacked sufficient training. So I spent a half hour looking at the GPSs myself. Finally, I went up to the employee and said: “If you can show me how this GPS works, I will buy it.” He was unable how to show me how to perform even the simplest function. (To me, this is akin to asking a phone salesperson how to make a phone call on a particular phone, and having them say they don’t know how.) So then I said: “Listen, if you can find any employee in this store who knows how to use this GPS, I will buy it right now.” He walked up to a couple of employees and cursorily asked them if they knew how to use GPSs, but they both shook their heads ‘no’ and continued on with their conversations.
Figuring that the Roseville store was unusual in this regard, I returned to the Eagan store. Again, no one knew how the GPS I had selected functioned. The day before Christmas, I stopped at the Apple Valley location, but, again, no employee knew even the most basic workings of a GPS.
On January 1st, the coupon expired. My wife and I visited the Apple Valley Best Buy and used our $100 gift card on various trivial items.
I am completely astonished that I did not purchase a GPS. With my gift card and coupon, a $500 GPS would have only cost me $200 out-of-pocket. I really wanted one. And yet, no employee – at five different locations – was able to competently demonstrate this device.
I hope this letter serves to make you aware of the need to train your employees on the use of the items they sell. Particularly in tougher financial times, customers are not likely to make six trips to five different locations to purchase an item they don’t really need.
As for me, I am considering swearing off Best Buy once again, having been stridently reminded of the poor service I experienced there in the past. If you can offer any help in the area of acquiring a GPS, I’d appreciate it.
Thanks for your time.
edatI’d be interested in hearing if you get a response from your letter. I have sworn off big box stores for buying electronics ( and many other things). I do the research, which can be long and arduous, then buy from Amazon, no sales tax, no shipping. How can you beat that? Plus you never know if the sales reps are telling the truth anyway. The big box stores can’t afford to train them, because that would mean they would have to pay them more, and then store prices would have to go up. You cannot have the best of both worlds, low prices, AND well trained staff. It is either one or the other.
This is why I usually make sure I research and know exactly what I want before I get to store. Half the time I know more about the product than the employees, sometimes including that they have the product in the store in the first place. You could have saved a lot of gas by checking In-Store availability on the best buy website. The site will tell you which stores have it in stock and saves a lot of time.
Good comments.
Yeah, I do research on-line most of the time. I guess I didn’t think this would be that difficult of a purchase. I mean, sure, I research cars, computers, TVs, stuff like that. But a GPS? I hadn’t realized (or I guess I’d just forgotten) what numbskulls they are at Best Buy.
If I get a response, I’ll post it, but Best Buy never responds. Oh well. On public radio this morning, they said Best Buy is struggling because of the economy. I wanted to call in and say “Yes, but also, they’re idiots”.
I’m not really surprised. I used to work at Best Buy, and they give you zero product training. All they train you to do is sell their extended warranties and Geek Squad services, nothing about the actual products you’re selling. You have to figure that out on your own, if you even have time to pay attention to what’s on the shelves, since usually they keep you quite busy with a daily task list (dusting the shelves, straightening out the boxes, checking prices with the database, etc.) which there will be hell to pay if it isn’t finished by the end of your shift. My first day, I literally got thrown to the wolves. It was literally like “ok, go sell stuff,” and that was it. I had no idea what was in stock, no idea what to recommend to people. I was a fish out of water. I’m not sure if this was the situation in your area or not, but very rarely did we sell a GPS. It was kind of the back, forgotten corner of the store where no salesman dared venture. I’m actually amazed how cult-like it was working there. There was group chanting in the morning, chastising of underperforming salesman, the whole thing felt like everything revolved around the store. I had worked at Sears appliance department before and the atmosphere was so much more casual.
Best Buy has been struggling quite a while. I’ve talked to one of the people who worked for headquarters and she was saying that a few years ago they had to open 300 new stores every year just to keep the same profit levels because the old stores don’t make any money. It really gets me though how people can have such poor customer service and then blame the economy when they go under. I’ve known a couple businesses like that.
Thanks for posting, Brian.
Yeah, my ex-brother-in-law used to work at Best Buy, and he was a little creeped out by their cult-like mentality.
It’s pretty obvious that they are trained more on how to sell a warranty than on the actual products. I remember walking around with a printer in my hands once, and my wife was looking for an employee to ask them a question about the printer’s software. When she finally found an employee, he looked at me and said: “Go ahead and set that printer down, ’cause we’ve some options to discuss.” Which, basically, menat he just wanted to try selling me an extended warranty on his printer. At one point, I said to him “Man, all this talk of needing the warranty makes me think this printer isn’t very good quality.”
I feel bad for people who lose their job in this economy, but if Best Buy goes under, I won’t be attending the funeral.