What I wanted to clear up was that actually Best Buy is quite a good company to work for and purchase from. I have been in stores that honestly have employees that do not care but where I am from those people performance managed out of the company for associates that do. The store I am currently working with is very knowledgable about many things and although most of them are young, they are incredible well trained in their respective areas.

I hope you give them another chance and best of luck to you.
Ad astra per aspera.

It may be that I work in a smaller store, or maybe it’s all best buys, but the people I work with are uncaring, lazy, and most of the time just plain stupid. Being at checkout I have to deal with the salesfloors problems all day long. This includes saleskids telling the wrong price on items, getting the wrong item completly, and sometimes I believe plain lying. I’d say they were just incompetent fools who can’t read to save thier lives, but the amount of complaints I get about not getting what they were told just makes me want to kick down a shelf and walk out.

A bit of background, I attented a two year tech school in high school, for networking. And I just earned my associates degree, again for networking. I’ve spent many years working with computers, and genearlly know what I’m talking about when it comes to them. Why best buy denies my requests to switch me departments is beyond me.

Speaking of incompetence, the trainings they do are called “E-Learings” which is pretty much a bit of text and a test over it. This would be great if they ever updated the tests! The tests ask you about policies that have been gone for years, old technologies, and even old promotoins (why you would test someone over a temoporary promotion is beyond me).

None of the PC department employees (in my store) know enough about computers to get them much past “on”. Sure, their job is to sell a product, but the ability to answer simple questions about a computer SHOULD be a part of that job.

Geek Squad is filled with more salesmen. I’ve seen countless time someone bring in a simple problem, the geek squad agent looks at it and imediatly ships it off. A few times I offered my opinion on several easily fixed problems that I have fixed myself countless times. Apparntly helping geek squad to quickly fix a customers problem is enough to get a “write up”. (the manager on duty started to yell at me there. I calmly told him that disciplining an employee in front of customers is extremly unprofesional and that I don’t get paid nearly enough to have anyone raise their voice to me. He promptly shut his mouth and I went on my way.)

The employees being rude and ignorant probably stems from the way management treats us. It’s blatently obvious that they care nothing of their employees other than performance. For example we had a young lady who’s mother was in a car accident and was killed. Of course she didn’t come to work the rest of the week (about four days of work she missed). She called let the managers know and even went as far as to get other people to cover her shift. Upon returning she was met with enough write-ups for not showing up to work to get her fired. Thankfully for her everyone in the store knew what happened and had taken her side on it and got corporate to remove them all from her file and apolagize to her.

Not saying that everyone in my store is horrible. Theres about five (out of roughtly 80) of us that I believe genuinly care about the customer and try to HONESTLY answer questions, rather than saying anything to get rid of people.

Want to have some fun with best buy? If you know your stuff about computers, or TV’s or anything that you can find in there go in and ask technical questions. Try asking someone the difference between a HDD (hard disk drive)and a SSD (solid state drive) and watch them stammer and usually make something up. Try asking the difference between a Plasma and an LCD. Most best buy employees are high school kids who have no clue what they are talking about.

All in all I’m ashamed to have worked for a company as horrid as Best Buy. Thankfully, now that I’ve graduated I’ve gotten a job offer elsewhere and was able to put in my two week notice today. =)

I can say as a former services manager for BB that Nathaniel’s reaction was probably one of habit, albeit the wrong one. The astounding number of times someone’s ipod “just cracked” while playing, or a laptop screen just snapped of when they opened it carefully, makes for a callus attitude towards complaints of these nature sometimes. Nathaniel should have calmly investigated the matter initially, and looked for those signs that the camera had been mistakenly resold instead of being sent back to the manufacturer (and then he should have held those employees responsible for making such a serious mistake in the first place! It is certainly not their SOP to resell used product unknowingly!). They need to develop and stick to a standard for returns and exchanges of this nature, because its apparent that the first owner was able to return their camera without issue (which btw, its standard practice to test products before the return, which would have required the geeks to take a few photos, do you think those Geek photos you found were from when they tested the camera during your return? or where they there from the test of the original owner’s return?).

I wish you the best of luck with the rest of your resolution, and I hope Nathaniel, and the rest of store #519 learn to correct their methodology behind resolving issues like yours.

Don’t be mistaken. While we were happy with the outcome with the camera itself, we have still filed a complaint with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office of Consumer Affairs.

I hope that Robert is true to his word and those involved will be held accountable (in my opinion, termination is the only solution).

I would say that I’m glad it worked out for you, your son and your mother-in-law, but the truth is you shouldn’t have to go through what you went through. Period. Best Buy should be ashamed of themselves. This isn’t the first time I have heard about someone buying a product advertised as “new” from Best Buy only to find it was used and shrink wrapped over.

I think the fact that you didn’t make this case all about you is commendable and kept you focused on getting the best resolution for the two people who mattered most — her and your son.