Best Buy employees not honoring price matches and getting paid for it

A week ago, you may recall an article I wrote about Best Buy employees not honoring price matches. They gave some pretty bogus reasons such as the competitor store was running a limited time sale, and they do not honor limited time sales. It seems that most of these incidences are occurring in New York, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was happening elsewhere.
On March 19, the US District Court granted a Class Action Certification which enabled Plaintiff Thomas Jermyn and other NY residents the ability to sue Best Buy because they were in violation of their own price matching policy. Best Buy loves to advertise their price matching policy, which attracts innocent customers into buying their products after they deny their price adjustment. In addition, employees that deny a lot of price adjustments receive bonuses! I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of companies receiving bonuses (cough AIG).
At this point, you might be thinking it’s just a few customers who have been denied price adjustments, but in reality, the deny over a 100 requests a week! Among this, two former Best Buy employees also claimed that Best Buy management would train their employees specifically to deny price matches.
I’m willing to put money on it that other companies are trying to do similar things to cut costs and save money in desperate times. Maybe in the short term, Best Buy will have saved money from denying price matches, but in the long run they will probably be hurt by this scandal.
Read [HD Guru]
Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! -
Subscribe to our feed
Macworld 2010
"Apple may not be at Macworld 2010, but Appletell is, bringing you news, photos and videos directly from the show floor and special events. Join us February 10-14 to see what new products 2010 has in store for Macintosh, iPhone, iPod and iPad (yes, iPad) owners."
Palm Pre Information & Updates
Palm just introduced their next-gen smartphone, the Palm Pre, and next-gen operating system, Palm webOS. Gadgetell's got the latest Pre and webOS information and news for you right here.




BEST BUY SUCKS
on March 24, 2009 at 11:26 PM - LINKBest Buy employees do not receive bonuses for denying price matches. The policy is sketchy but the big misconception is that they honor the price match if you can find the same product (ie same model) at a local competitor. Now if that product is not available or “sold out” at the other store, Best Buy does not have to honor the price match. If you cannot buy the product at that price at the other store where your trying to get the price match from, Best Buy should not have to price match the item. I agree the policy could use some clarification but Best Buy employees do not get “paid” for not honoring price matches, change your title of the article to something correct…
on March 25, 2009 at 09:59 AM - LINKAnonymous-
While I do not know this firsthand, the site I sourced stated, “Bonuses Paid To Managers That Violate “Price Match” Policy, Former Employees Allege.” And even respectable tech sites such as Gizmodo claims, “according to internal docs, personnel are trained to deny price-matches and even paid bonuses for shutting them down.”
And you are right, they are not paid for not honoring price matches, they are paid bonuses when they deny a legit price match.
on March 25, 2009 at 05:09 PM - LINKAs being an employee of Best Buy i am willing to testify that A>Not all best buys recieve bonuses, only Best Buys the perform well recieve bonuses, such as doing well with geek squad precinct and cutting down on shrink cost. We do honor our price match to all local competitors but we will not honor online stores because half the time the product that is being resold has been purchased from a Best Buy or Staples or Wal-Mart, so it is called a secondary sell point. We will honor local competitors for example a staples is right across the street if they are running a sale on
a laptop, we will def. honor their price match, but if their is a a store in egypt that has it for this amount we will not because of travel cost etc.
In speculation everything you mentioned is false
on May 1, 2009 at 09:34 AM - LINK