I used to love Best Buy. Not in the way a man loves a woman, or a fish loves water, or a Green Party candidate loves the sympathy that comes from losing, but love in the way a person loves unnecessary stuff. Some people fill their houses with junk from garage sales. I fill my house with gadgets that'll be obsolete in six months.
As a gadget fanatic, computer fanatic, and music fanatic, I was naturally a big fan of Best Buy. But in the last few years, the store has gone downhill. I don't mind a few flaws or annoyances from a business, but Best Buy has become one of the most annoying businesses ever, seemingly overnight. It's like if I started dating Angelina Jolie, and then she turned into a fat, drunken midget who eats at Hardee's.
Oh God, how I hate Hardee's. But let's go through the list of grievances.
First is the service plans. There's no bigger rip-off than Best Buy's service plans. If their service plans were a fairy tale, that fairy tale would be called "Gullible's Travels: What A Stupid Asshole". They're annoying and insulting. When you purchase a $100 pair of speakers, Best Buy offers you a $30 service plan that lets you replace the speakers if they break within four years. That's one-third the price of the speakers. The speakers can be returned for free if they're faulty, which means the only thing the service plan guards against is clumsy douchebags. It's douchebag protection, and we are the supposed douchebags. I just love a business that assumes I'm a douchebag and then tries to exploit me just in case they're wrong. Maybe I should quit my job and just sell douchebag protection to my friends who drink too often. For $40 each, I'll forget every stupid thing they do for the next four years.
Who wants to sign up?
No one?
No kidding.
Here's a better method that Best Buy can learn from. When I bought a pair of sunglasses, the store had a policy where if I broke them, I could buy new ones for half price. No extra money was required; it was a free deal. This showed me the business cared and was even willing to sacrifice a little money for clumsy people. They wanted to keep profitable douchebags as customers, but they didn't insult the non-douchebags in the process. They just made them feel safe.
Enough about it. That was a long complaint, but here's another one that's shorter: Best Buy now sells magazine subscriptions at the counter, and sometimes even asks for your telephone number or to give you a survey. Where else do you find these annoying sales pitches and information gathering? From telemarketers. Act like a store, Best Buy, not a telemarketer.
Moving on while still focusing on wasteful crap, why is one of Best Buy's receipts longer than a supermarket receipt from a family of eight? I buy one item and the receipt is two feet long. Best Buy, you have cash registers smart enough to prompt the cashier to ask for my phone number, so why do the registers give me an annoyingly long list of information on rebates when my products don't include any?
I could go on forever, bringing up the clueless nature of their employees or the fact that none of them seem to have any interest in gadgets or technology at all, but what's the point? Best Buy is a corporation. If they sell one service plan or get their employees to say "Entertainment Weekly" enough to make it stick in people's heads like the magazine wants, they'll keep doing it.
It's so funny that it's almost a joke. It isn't, but they are.
