Wow. Best Buy employees are insanely stupid



  • OK.  I guess we already know this.  But seriously, if you're going to be in the business of selling computers, shouldn't you have some people who .... I don't know .... maybe actually know somethng about computers?

    So yesterday I was in the local Best Buy and saw this really nice laptop.  A  16 inch screen and great specs but still very light.  I wasn't really planning to buy anything, but the  price was really good, and I started thinking that maybe it was time to replace my 4 year old Gateway laptop that I hardly use any more because it was a POS when I bought it.   Yes I know.  Using "Gateway" and "POS" in the same sentence is redundant and buying a Gateway is TRWTF.

    So I'm checking out the laptop and making small talk with the Annoying Sales Douchebag.  Several times I try to politely let him know that I'm not Grandpa Clueless when it comes to computers, in hope that maybe he would go away, but he wasn't taking the hint.  The conversation was filled with lots of minor WTFs. 

    "Micorosoft Office 2003 won't run on Windows 7"  (Holy Crap! That's terrible!  Especially since I've been running that exact combination on my main desktop computer for over a year now.  In all fairness, Annoying Sales Douchbag looked like he was probably in 5th grade when Office 2003 came out). 

    "The free version of AVG antivirus only updates once a month" (Uh-oh.  My wife's copy is broken.  It updates every day).

    So finally I decide to buy the laptop and Annoying Sales Douchebag immediatley starts the hard sell, trying to convince me that I really need to buy their $129 "PC Setup"  which, as far as I can tell, amounts to deleting all the useless crap that comes pre-installed.  I politely decline and tell him that I can handle that.  But he's not giving up.  What comes next is my favorite WTF conversation of the year:

    Annoying Sales Douchebag:  "We also create a recovery disk for you -- they don't include those with the computers anymore"

    Me:  "That's OK.  As soon as I get home the first thing I'll do is use Acronis True Image to make an image of the hard drive"

    Annoying Sales Douchebag:  "An image isn't any good without an operating system"

    Me:  "Uh ..... wait ..... what?"

    At that point I think I may have actually laughed out loud. I politely declined again and bought the laptop.  Note to Best Buy:  maybe teach your employees some inter-personal skills, like recognize when the customer actually knows something and drop the bullshit at that point.   Oh, yeah, and the bit about the recovery disk was a blatant lie. It's on a hidden partition on the hard drive and just requires a couple clicks to burn your own disk.

    Ironically (or not, depending on your definition of ironic), I started out looking at the iPad and Annoying Sales Douchebag talked me out of it (unintentionally).  My wife is always telling me how her boss has one and is always raving about how much he loves it.  Considering that her boss is a moron, I didn't really take that as a ringing endorsement.  But being clueless about theiPad, it did seem intriguing so I decided to take a look.

    So I'm looking at the iPad and it does seem pretty cool.  Small, thin, light.  And it does have some neat features,  But eventually, the limitations just seem to out-weigh the cool features and being forced to live in Steve Jobs' walled-in locked-down world is just too much of a turn-off.  It was at this point that Annoying Sales Douchbag says that I really need to buy their $300 protection plan because the iPad essentially has no warranty.  "It's not repairable.  You can't even open it.  If anything breaks or stops working,  you're out of luck."  (Of course this also turns out to be a blatant lie.  A quick search of the Apple website reveals that the iPad has a 1 year warranty. )

    It was at that point I noticed the laptop, which was the same exact price as the most expensive iPad (which is the only one worth buying since they appear to be non-upgradeable). In all fairness, the iPad and a laptop are two different animals, and I can see some situtations where the iPad would be desirable,  But for me, at the same exact price, I just can't bring myself to buy the one that does less.

    So that's my Christmas story for this year.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    So that's my Christmas story for this year.

    You saved $1000 in a single visit to Best Buy (PC setup plus iPad plus protection plan). I'd say that's a pretty good Christmas!



  • @El_Heffe said:

    OK.  I guess we already know this.  But seriously, if you're going to be in the business of selling computers, shouldn't you have some people who .... I don't know .... maybe actually know somethng about computers?

    Because people who know something about computers can make more money elsewhere. Duh.

    @El_Heffe said:

    "Micorosoft Office 2003 won't run on Windows 7"

    Hah. Office '97 runs fine on Windows 7. I've witnessed it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Hah. Office '97 runs fine on Windows 7. I've witnessed it.
    I have a couple of programs from the days of Windows 95 that run on Windows 7 x64.  I have to give Microsoft credit, they do a pretty good job of maintaining backward compatibilty.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    OK.  I guess we already know this.  But seriously, if you're going to be in the business of selling computers, shouldn't you have some people who .... I don't know .... maybe actually know somethng about computers?

    Because people who know something about computers can make more money elsewhere. Duh.

    Judging by the apparent age of the employees, which seems to be somewhere around 14, I've always suspected that it must be a really shitty place to work and all the adults go elsewhere.


  • Garbage Person

     I had a bit of a desperate stint in college and applied to work at the shiny new grand-opening Best Buy. I had "too much experience" and was told in no uncertain terms that I was unwelcome as anything other than a cashier or loss prevention. No service, no sales.

     I have a set policy with retail purchases. More than one upsell attempt = no sale. Any lies (or even employees spouting off about shit they truly don't understand) are also an IMMEDIATE no sale.



  • This spring I bought an HDTV at Best Buy.  The sales guy offered to get me an HDMI cable off the shelf and I said "No thanks, I keep a couple extra around the house, you can get them for a few bucks on the Internet".  He then tells me that any cable purchased from the Internet won't work properly and his cable goes up to 240Hz.  That 240Hz comment would be stupid enough if I were buying an LCD TV, but I was buying a plasma.  Of course, Best Buy would have made more money from the sale of a single cable than a $1500 TV.



  • There is some (small) validity to the comment about 240Hz and the cable. Check out the HDMI versions and specificatiions at Wikipedia There is a speed rating for cables, but everything I've read for real world experience is that the various inexpensive cables from Monoprice or your favorite Internet purveyor will work great.



  • @sinistral said:

    There is some (small) validity to the comment about 240Hz and the cable. Check out the HDMI versions and specificatiions at Wikipedia There is a speed rating for cables, but everything I've read for real world experience is that the various inexpensive cables from Monoprice or your favorite Internet purveyor will work great.
    No there isn't.  A 240Hz TV can only understand a 60Hz signal.  If you managed to send it a 240Hz signal, it would just show a black screen.  There is no HDTV standard faster than 60Hz.



  • That may be, but the standards already exist for broadcast quality that some day may exist. The HDMI cabling spec (1.3) does specify speed ratings and words to use for those speeds. From The Wiki

    HDMI 1.3 defines two cable categories: Category 1-certified cables, which have been tested at 74.5 MHz (which would include resolutions such as 720p60 and 1080i60), and Category 2-certified cables, which have been tested at 340 MHz (which would include resolutions such as 1080p60 and 2160p30). Category 1 HDMI cables are to be marketed as "Standard" and Category 2 HDMI cables as "High Speed".

    You can see their cite for this is HDMI Specification 1.3a Section 4.2.6

    Again, I'm not talking about the video signal, but the capacity of the cabling that carries the signal.


  • 🚽 Regular

    Wow, funny. I had a very similar experience at Best Buy over a year ago. Ironically, I wound up buying the Gateway laptop, although so far it seems to work very well, believe it or not. I didn't need an uber-laptop, and it works well for my needs. I bought an OS upgrade, since I didn't want the basic version of Windows 7, and it took every effort to get him out of my face about how Geeksquad can upgrade my OS for me for only $200. Incredulous, I asked if that included the software itself and he said, "Oh, no, you have to buy the upgrade for $145 for a total of $345". After convincing him that, as a software engineer, I can format the hard drive and install it myself, I realized I had the added benefit of removing all the default crap that comes bundled with the laptop like "100 hours free on AOL."which Geeksquad would certainly add to the computer as an upgrade.

    Although Best Buy's computer department is lame, their A/V department seems quite knowledgable. I actually got some useful advice from the blue shirts about mounting my TV to the wall and minimizing the cable mess.



  • @sinistral said:

    That may be, but the standards already exist for broadcast quality that some day may exist. The HDMI cabling spec (1.3) does specify speed ratings and words to use for those speeds. From The Wiki
    HDMI 1.3 defines two cable categories: Category 1-certified cables, which have been tested at 74.5 MHz (which would include resolutions such as 720p60 and 1080i60), and Category 2-certified cables, which have been tested at 340 MHz (which would include resolutions such as 1080p60 and 2160p30). Category 1 HDMI cables are to be marketed as "Standard" and Category 2 HDMI cables as "High Speed".

    You can see their cite for this is HDMI Specification 1.3a Section 4.2.6 Again, I'm not talking about the video signal, but the capacity of the cabling that carries the signal.

    You are making the same error that the Best Buy guys did.  The 240Hz in a 240Hz TV has absolutely nothing to do with the frame rate or the clock speed of the signal.  It is a feature where three intermediate frames are interpolated from a 60 frame per second base signal on the cable.  Their suggestion that the cable would have any bearing on the usefulness of a 240Hz TV shows a lack of understanding or a desire to lie and sell product.  All plasmas refresh at 600Hz, mainly because they have to -- plasma phosphors dim very quickly and have to be re-lit 10 times to sustain the picture for an entire frame.  Yet, plasmas have been working fine for the last five years with any old HDMI cable.

    Also, from your reference, a 1080p monitor that has neither 120Hz nor 240Hz technology will still need a high speed cable to receive a 1080p signal and display it at 60Hz.  Once again, the speed of the signal has nothing to do with the advertised "update rate" of the monitor, only this time in the other direction.



  • Oh, sorry, no, I was never saying that the signal speed had anything to do with the display refresh or resolution (other than the speed of the signal produces an upper bound on those variables). So we agree. The only point I had is that there is such a thing as a "high speed" HDMI cable and a "standard" HDMI cable, and in this one tiny case, the difference is real (but not worth paying Monster prices for).



  • @Jaime said:

    This spring I bought an HDTV at Best Buy.  The sales guy offered to get me an HDMI cable off the shelf and I said "No thanks, I keep a couple extra around the house, you can get them for a few bucks on the Internet".  He then tells me that any cable purchased from the Internet won't work properly and his cable goes up to 240Hz.  That 240Hz comment would be stupid enough if I were buying an LCD TV, but I was buying a plasma.  Of course, Best Buy would have made more money from the sale of a single cable than a $1500 TV.

    Ha! that's funny.  I'd like someone to show me a cable that couldn't pass 240 Hz.



  • Chiming in with my Best Buy WTF.

    Last year I was walking through the store looking at computer parts because I had an idea of building a system (and no I was not going to buy parts from there - I was just trying to get some inspiration).  So I had squatted down to look at a case and then a CPU heatsink - one of those fancy ones with all the copper flanges and heat pipes.  At that point the BB teenager came up behind me (so I couldn't see him) and said loudly(*) "Do you know what that is?" as if to show how smart he was.  I felt like saying "Yes you dumb shit - I've been building computers since before you were born", but all I did was glare at him and say "yes", and then ignored him.  He stood around for a while and then walked off.

    (*) Something that I have never seen in any other country is that in the US countless times I have had people start conversations with me when I wasn't even facing them or knew they were standing behind me.  I have aslo seen people do this to store clerks and not start with an "Excuse me" to let the clerk know that some attention is needed, but instead they start off with their demand - "Where is such-and-such". From my perspective this is totally rude.



  • @OzPeter said:

    (*) Something that I have never seen in any other country is that in the US countless times I have had people start conversations with me when I wasn't even facing them or knew they were standing behind me.  I have aslo seen people do this to store clerks and not start with an "Excuse me" to let the clerk know that some attention is needed, but instead they start off with their demand - "Where is such-and-such". From my perspective this is totally rude.

    The US is pretty goddamned big, and not even slightly homogeneous. I'm born and raised here, and I also think that's rude... please don't paint all 300+ million of us based on your experience in Louisiana. (Or whatever podunk Walmart-loving hellhole you were in.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The US is pretty goddamned big, and not even slightly homogeneous. I'm born and raised here, and I also think that's rude... please don't paint all 300+ million of us based on your experience in Louisiana. (Or whatever podunk Walmart-loving hellhole you were in.)
    I've seen it in at least 3 or 4 different states across the country from NE to Deep south to West coast.  I have travelled widely and never experienced that in any other country.   So one hand you can say 3 or 4 states out of 50 is nothing, on the other hand 14 or 15 other countries tend to disagree with you.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I also think that's rude

    And let's face it, if _you_ think it's rude... then it's pretty rude.

    Edit: This needed a tag, but it's broken again. Insert your own ;)



  • @OzPeter said:

    I've seen it in at least 3 or 4 different states across the country from NE to Deep south to West coast.  I have travelled widely and never experienced that in any other country.   So one hand you can say 3 or 4 states out of 50 is nothing, on the other hand 14 or 15 other countries tend to disagree with you.

    I'm guessing "west coast" means "California." I dunno; I'm from Washington State, I think most of the US is a hellhole. (Especially anything east of, say, Kansas. And California.)



  • @OzPeter said:

    So I had squatted down to look at a case and then a CPU heatsink - one of those fancy ones with all the copper flanges and heat pipes.  At that point the BB teenager came up behind me (so I couldn't see him) and said loudly(*) "Do you know what that is?" as if to show how smart he was.


    They stop doing it if you can arrange to be holding some multi-thousand-dollar display item at the time and you drop it on the floor when they startle you.


  • @da Doctah said:

    @OzPeter said:

    So I had squatted down to look at a case and then a CPU heatsink - one of those fancy ones with all the copper flanges and heat pipes.  At that point the BB teenager came up behind me (so I couldn't see him) and said loudly(*) "Do you know what that is?" as if to show how smart he was.



    They stop doing it if you can arrange to be holding some multi-thousand-dollar display item at the time and you drop it on them when they startle you.

    FTFY


  • Garbage Person

     Northeasterners are self-important pricks. West coasters are self-important pricks. Southerners are just stupid and could detect your foreignerness and didn't like it.

     

    Seriously, I'm from quite literally the border of north and south, and when my race team travels into the deep south for a race, we have to put up with being "damn Yankees" for the whole weekend. Last race, one of the other teams was wearing blackface, was carrying around watermelons and had done up their truck in a Sanford and Son theme and this was TOTALLY acceptable to the locals.

    Contrast this with when we travel to the midwest, where everybody is PAINFULLY polite, and when we travel to the northeast, where everyone drives like goddamn assholes and achieve nearly Californian levels of self-importance. (We don't go to the Northeast anymore. We've replaced it on next year's schedule with Texas)



  • @Weng said:

    when my race team travels into the deep south for a race, we have to put up with being "damn Yankees" for the whole weekend.
    The other week I was in SC and met a guy who had moved there and was being called a Damn Yankee all the time.  The trouble was that he was born in Richmond Va - The capital of the South during the war of Northern Agression.



  •  Hmm, I wonder where on ye olde Mason-Dixon line you live, Weng, if you're not in the midwest or the coast... most of the states that aren't in the midwest or on the coast but are still near that border weren't even states back in the Civil War! I live in Ohio, maybe 15 or 20 miles from Kentucky... the Underground Railroad is a big part of local history; we've got the Freedom Center museum in downtown Cincinnati (not to mention the (in)famous Creation Museum not far down into Kentucky)...

    But on the topic of overzealous salespeople at electronics stores...

    Me: I'd like to buy this universal TV remote control for my dad since his DVD player remote broke. (Don't worry, I don't think my dad reads TDWTF!)

    Salesman: OK, would you like any batteries? We have some over here at the counter... (Don't they always have those "on sale" at Radio Shack?! But their "sale" prices are even higher than the regular prices anywhere else...)

    Me: Are those rechargeable? What kind of batteries does this need anyway? (Yeah, I know it needs batteries, but I've probably got some around already!)

    Salesman: No, these aren't rechargeables; it probably needs AAA... let me check... *grabs magnifying glass* Oh, sorry, it needs AA... oh, and it looks like they're already included! (1. he almost sold me the wrong batteries! 2. I don't even need batteries seeing as there are some included and they last practically forever in remotes apart from Wii remotes with their vibration feature! 3. who ever uses alkaline batteries anyway, except for the freebies they throw in with stuff like this?!)

    Me: Oh,  OK, well I've got plenty of AA's at home, and if there are some included, then that should be good! (Your +5 cloak of evasion deflects the blow!)

    Salesman: All right, would you like to get an extended warranty? It's only $6 for one year and $10 for two years, and if anything goes wrong we'll send you a gift certificate for the purchase price! (The salesman assumes a stance from which he can easily dodge and counter!)

    Me: No, thanks, I'm good. (You cast Insulatle! Your resistance to sales attacks increases a lot!)



  • I don't have any Best Buys stories, as I avoid the place, but I would like to point out you're spelling "Damnyanks" incorrectly. It's one word. Just ask my grandmother. Damnyanks.



  • @Xyro said:

    don't
     

    That was 202 characters, damnyou. But I couldn't quote you. How did you do that?



  • Initial posts are only allowed (?) 187 characters (or less?), but edited posts get 274! More than enough for anybody!



  • How much is 274 chars in imperial? I think we're on to something here.



  • Filed under: oct(187) = 273
    lolwat the heck. Just ... just... wh... I can't even fathom.

    Also, 273 is BB in hex. ... ...BEST BUY!! THEY HAXX0RD US!!



  • Maybe the original post length limit was 10247 (for whatever reason), but somehow Alex deleted the first character from the configuration, rendering it 0247. Depending on how the config value is read, the limit gets set to either 0247 or 247...



  • GODDAAMMMITT

    keeping this short: only rich kids work there.  No pride in work.  LOL


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