Testimonial #27: Another insider, with tips!

Dear PissedOff,

My name is Ryan. I have recently left Best Buy. I was a Sales Manager in Texas and I know a lot about how things work within Best Buy. As so many people on your site, I feel sickened by the things that Best Buy does and it bothers me to know that I was once a part of it. In an effort to undo all the wrongs that I did I would like to offer to help you and your site in any way possible. Your site is great and I am impressed by the support you have already amassed. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help. Meanwhile, I have several tips that I wanted to throw out.

One tip I wanted to give you is one that I plan on using in the future and indeed, I have already used. On big ticket items such as computers and tvs always go ahead and purchase the service plan. As one person noted, the technicians at Best Buy are not certified in any way. I used to be a lead technician before I was promoted to Management so I can verify that. After using your big ticket item for let's say half of the Service Plan period call a tech-savvy-friend and tell them that you would like help your product go defective. You see there are many ways to render products useless in a neat and careful way. One common mistake people make is in abusing there product in a non-tactful way. Best Buy trains their technicians to look for signs of abuse. If a product covered by the Service Plan goes bad the Best Buy technicians are strongly encouraged by management to find any trivial indication that it was abused because if you read the fine print inside the Service Plan, abuse immediately voids the Service Plan and thereby relenquishes Best Buy from having to help you with your product even though you paid a ton of money for the Performance Service Plan. However, there are no signs of abuse Best Buy has two courses of action: 1 - if the product is what Best Buy calls "DEVO" they will exchange it immediately; 2 - if the product is not "DEVO" they have to send it to a service center for repair. Per the fine print in the service plan, any item that is repaired three times and in need of repair a fourth time must also be replaced. So here's a hypothetical for you... say your really tired of that old Pentium 2 PC. Help it go downhill a little faster (let's say by simulating a power surge to the main board, hypothetically speaking of course) then take it to your local Best Buy and get a new PC. It's what I like to call the Service Plan exchange program. When they do the exchange your old Service Plan goes null, so be sure to ask if you can purchase a new Service Plan. Their eyes will light up and look like they just won the lottery, they will literally be tripping over each other to help you get that new Service Plan because they don't realize that in another couple of years, your going to use it to get another new product. Be sure to throw away original receipts if you do this several times and bring in a receipt with four previous exchanges stapled to it, they might start to catch on. Now, to upgrade your PC every couple of years all you have to spend is a little over a hundred dollars for the Service Plan, not thousands of dollars. The other great thing is that it's very unprofitable for Best Buy, the funny part is that since Best Buy is so wrapped up in selling Service Plans they will never even stop to think about the money their losing, in fact they will be so delighted that you purchased a new Service Plan they will probably bed over backwards to help you in whatever way they can.

Another tip involves getting free product. If a big ticket item (appliance, computer, tv, etc.) is not in-stock the sales rep may offer to order it for you, you should jump at this opportunity. (There are several different ways they can order product, steer away from something called Customer Fulfillment and instead opt for something called "ORCA".) You will pay for the product that day and before you leave you will receive a piece of paper that has your order information and your receipt will either be printed directly on this sheet or stapled to it. If you have done everything correctly the sheet will read at the top "Best Buy Co., Inc." underneath that it will read "Customer Claim Check", then underneath that on the right it will list the store that you purchase it at and on the right it will list your order number. Now, you leave and wait for your product to arrive. Once it has arrived go in to the store. Once in the store walk around for while. Then go to LP (the guy in the yellow shirt at the door) and tell him that you are here to pick up an order, you went to Customer Service they closed your order and told you wait by the door for the product. When they finally bring the product up and load it in your car the LP guy will ask you for your order sheet so he can sign-off on it, try to avoid him altogether of just tell him that they kept it up at customer service. If you are able to leave without actually having your order closed or your order sheet signed-off on, you can come back at anytime and pickup another one of the same product. It sounds complicated but it happens without people even trying all the time. If you ever get a phone call after you have ordered something and it sounds like this... "Uhhh..Mr. So&So this is ________ calling from Best Buy, I just wanted to follow up on that new product you ordered to see how you were liking it and make sure that it met your satisfaction" ..this is actually an employee in the store calling people on a report that prints out daily. The reason they are calling is because they are not sure if you have picked up your product or not. You see once you say the product is great or no....it sucks they know that you did pick it up and that they can go ahead and close out your order. Believe me they could care less if you liked the product you got.

Here's what I call my low price tip. If you are in search of the absolute lowest price on something. Strike up a coversation one of the employees and only sound moderately interested. Let them feel like they are really selling you. Go ahead and listen to their speech about all the accessories and performance service plans. Then act like your sold and ask the sales person to check with their manager and find out what the best price could be if you were to buy the product, the service plan, and all the accessories. If they think you are going to buy all of it they will drop the price on the product. Then when you get ready to ring it all up say that you changed your mind and all you want is the product itself. They have no recourse but to sell it to you for the price that they already gave you. If they do have the balls to try and change it back to full price ask for that person's name and tell them you are going to report them. They will usually change their mind because if they changed the price solely based on the fact that you were buying service plans and accessories they did something known in the Best Buy world known as "in-boarding" which is an immediately terminable offense. You end up getting a really low price on your product. If by chance you want to know how low they can go on something sneak up to a register and read down on the bottom of the screen, it should have an option to push F4 to check employee price, go ahead and push F4, it will ask for an employee number, just type in 1 and hit enter. Then type in the SKU number of the product you want to check (the SKU number is generally a 7 digit number located in small print on the price tag, it will generally begin with a 3, 4, or 5) or if you can scan the UPC you can do that instead. The employee price will then pop-up the screen. Employee price is usually 5% above the cost of the product, so now you know exactly what is a good deal and what is not.

Hope all of this helps, maybe I will get a chance to send more info soon.

Ryan

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