Ok, well I’m not cutting Best Buy out completely…. I still need a local place to find a decent price on things like TV’s and appliances. But when it comes to computer parts and most other technology accessories… here’s why I’m done shopping at Best Buy.

  1. Incompetent Staff
  2. High Prices on EVERYTHING
  3. Unhelpful Staff
  4. Never have what I’m looking for
  5. Don’t sell the complementary goods to what I’m buying in the first place
  6. Incompetent Staff
  7. Incompetent Staff
  8. Unhelpful Staff
  9. The Staff is retarded
  10. Seriously, the staff doesn’t know shit about shit

Regarding numbers 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. I was at Best Buy a few times within the last month and 2 out of those 3 times have been terrible experiences. The only reason the other experience wasn’t a bad one was because I knew what I was looking for, I knew how to find it, and I never had any questions about it. The other two times were horrible because I had simple questions but they were too under-staffed to handle my simple question quickly. Then when I FINALLY tracked down an associate, I asked him if he sold the wireless adapter for the Netgear home theatre thingy I was looking at buying for almost $200—streams media to your TV from your home network. He immediately said no I’ll have to go online. Alright… fair answer. But then this supplements my point about #5; if I’m going to buy something to put near my TV in my entertainment center… which doesn’t have hard-wired Ethernet (and I don’t know many people that have CAT5 in their home theatre setup), I’d want to buy the wireless adapter. Good going Worst Buy… cost yourself a sale simply by not stocking a complementary good. I didn’t buy it.

Now the second time I went into Best Buy looking for a media center that streams media from my home network to my TV (since I had some money to burn), I asked about the wireless adapter for the Seagate HD Theatre+. Again…. after walking around trying to find an associate who wasn’t being a tool, I came across one who was a tool… because apparently “non-tool” associates don’t exist at Best Buy. So I asked him the same question “Do you sell the wireless adapter for this?” Keep in mind, it says right on the box that Seagate makes a wireless adapter for that unit but it is sold separately, though it doesn’t tell you any model information. What immediately tipped me off that he had no freaking clue what he was about to babble about was the fact that he looked at the back of the box and hunted for the “obvious” answer with his index finger… which is exactly what I did (sans the index finger thing). Then he handed the box back to me and told me to go to Home Theatre and ask for a USB Adapter for TiVo.

Ok, fine… I’ll play dumb consumer and follow his directions—big mistake, I forgot about my #1 reason for not shopping at Best Buy anymore. Luckily reason #2 kicked in when I saw the price on the TiVo wireless adapter. Seventy (70) dollars for a USB wireless G adapter for a freaking TiVo. Who in their right (and wrong) mind would even consider spending that much on a wireless G adapter for anything? Not I said the Cale. I put the adapter and the Seagate Home Theatre system back and promptly left the store.

So lets re-cap… Reasons #1, #2, #3, and #4 all cost Best Buy a few sales. In the business scheme of things if you think about it, how many times per day does that happen? How many times does Best Buy lose sales because they: have stupid associates; don’t have the complimentary item to something; don’t have what someone is looking for; and have something but the price is so high the customer just puts it back and leaves? They could have racked up about $300 in sales just on a single customer. So according to Wikipedia, there’s ~1,400 Best Buy stores in the US in 2007… probably more now, but lets use 2007’s numbers. Lets say my little fiasco happens in every one of those 1400 stores a total of ONE time per day (which imho is a fair number). That’s missed revenue of $420,000 per day. If you extrapolate that out to one year, that’s $153 million in missed revenue per YEAR! I know that pales in comparison to the company’s > $4 billion in annual revenue, but still if I were a business owner, I’d love to see $153 million more on the books every year.

Think about it Best Buy… think about it. In the mean time, I’m shopping at Fry’s, NewEgg, or Amazon.