Yeah, it's a lot like that actually.
But yeah, I think a lot of it varies from store to store. Best Buy and Future Shop are one and the same now, but they're run a bit differently. Future Shop is a bit more service oriented, while Best Buy is more of a big store you can just walk into and buy shit. Their staff doesn't get commission as far as I know and aren't paid as well. They're basically there to just tell you whatever specs they've memorized. The principle is that Future Shop is the 'higher end' store, where the sales people can actually tell you shit and help you out. The problem is that the salesmen suck for the most part. They're still only really concerned about getting you out of the store asap so they can make their commission, and they're obviously going to try to push whatever product has the most mark up on it or has a special bonus attached to the sale for them...regardless of if it's what you need or if it's the best available.
I think they did a bit of a restructuring a few years ago because then they started moving in new types of sales people that are like half on commission. They make a shit wage and might get commission from selling the extended warranties. You'd think you could trust them a bit more, but chances are they know a little less because they're already looking for another job, and the management is all over their balls trying to get them to move more shit they can sell warranties on. They're seriously all over them....constantly. It doesn't matter how many they sold...they could sell more, and if they do they get a promotion to do the exact same job but maybe make commission.
Well, that's what customer service reps are around for right? To make sure that there is someone out there that's only concern is customer satisfaction. Yeah, they're too busy dealing with getting a return, filing it, and then getting whatever defective shitty mp3 player someone got suckered into buying out of the transfer station in the back and returning it to whatever customer brought that back the week before. They can't help you with shit.
Management? Prime concern is that they're selling warranties and moving units. What's the highest mark up on? Usually cables and stuff like that, but also shitty monitors, mp3 players, and stereos. They're worried about moving these things and selling more warranties, so that their store can post bigger numbers, while their managers are worried about the same so that their region can post bigger numbers.
Any actual customer service you see from the corporate standpoint at that level is more or less a farce. These people all have so much artificial pressure placed on them that they think they've got to move this shit or they're going to starve. It's like they've created this weird atmosphere where they've got these people acting a bit like animals. Sure, the moral thing to do would be to help you out as much as possible and maybe even not sell you this shitty product....but there's 2 seconds left on the clock and it's desperation time. They can't fucking help you because that's 10 min that could be spent selling a warranty.
In that box store you walk into they only care about moving units, posting numbers, and selling warranties. That's it. Any illusion you get of customer service or customer concern is just to facilitate the corporate goal through a.) a positive public image, and b.) consumer loyalty. Big deal, this is a corporation and it exists for one reason - to make money. The difference is that they don't seem to realize or care that their business philosophy and corporate structuring has a negative impact on customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction (less important, but that in itself also has a negative impact on customer satisfaction). Their customer loyalty would be through the roof if the spent half the time they spend worrying about warranties and spent it thinking about actual customer service.
I'm not saying don't shop there or anything like that, I've never had a problem and a lot of the times I'm sure it works out well. The only thing is that the actual corporate stance on customer service is so vague it's almost non-existent. That basically leads to situations like this where a combination of shitty managers and employees can lead to nightmares like this and you don't really have anywhere to turn to unless you're motivated enough to track down the highest executive in the company you can contact and hope that they actually give a shit. And that's probably not going to change until whatever retards in charge of PR at these companies realize that this isn't like when they graduated in 1988 - pissed off people can get their fucking stories out to the public in the blink of an eye and something will have to be done to increase response time and satisfaction in cases like this.
If this kind of thing ever happens to you, you basically do what this guy did - you write letters, you CC the BBB, whatever body regulates trade in your area, and the media, and you let them know that this story is out there. For a business like this there is nothing worse than bad press and negative word of mouth, and they'll rectify the problem.
