About Me

Clovis, NM, United States
I live in a rural area with no professional job opportunities. As a result, several friends and I have recently started trying out a variety of work from home projects. This blog is about our experiences.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Boycott Best Buy

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. It was pretty quiet around here; the three of us ate turkey. Then, I left the house at 12:45 to hit Black Friday sales with a few friends in Amarillo. We hit Target, Toys R' Us, and Kohl's, got everything we wanted (and then some) and finally got home around 10:00 AM MST.
Unfortunately, my brother Matt didn't get what he wanted. Best Buy advertised $180 laptops, so my brother went to get one for his wife at 9 PM Thursday night. The ad said that there were plenty in stock, and that the store would be handing out tickets for the items at 3AM. After waiting for a few hours in the cold, when store employees came out at 3AM they only tried to get people to sign up for credit cards. Matt asked about the laptops, he was told they had "plenty". At 4:30 the store finally handed out the tickets for the laptops, all 10 of them. Then they had the gall to try to sell everyone else $600 laptops. Matt was mad (he refused to even go in the store), but not bnearly as made as guy #11 who had pitched a tent in front of the store for 2 days. That meant store employees passed him on the way out Wednesday night, and no one had the common decency to tell him to go home and spend Thanksgiving with his family, since they knew full well there were no laptops.
Now, I understand that Best Buy can run its sale anyway it wants. I get that they only offer a few deeply discounted items to get people into the store. Making people wait in line for days for products they know they don't have in stock, however, is just wrong. Furthermore, not telling people that they were out of those items at 3AM, as their ad said they would, is illegal. Did they really think that the kind of people who skip Thanksgiving for a good deal were going to be upsold several hundred dollars in a moment of panic?
And before you say something, yes, my brother tried to buy one online at 3AM. He went to the website at 2:45, and the deals weren't posted yet. He kept refreshing the page until 3 AM, when the website was mysteriously "down for maintenace". At 3:02 it was up again, but all of their specials were listed as "out of stock".
Matthew has sworn to never shop at Best Buy again, and I told him I would support his boycott. Granted, the nearest Best Buy to me is 135 miles away, but I'll never shop there again. Neither is Dan. For video games, we'll go to EB Games. For appliances we'll go to Lowe's or Sears. For movies we have Netflix, and for music we have I-Tunes. Who's boycotting with me?

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