My head is puking from the inside. I've just purchased a cellphone using Best Buy's fartacular website. I say "fartacular" because when you figure out how badly you've been misled, you feel like someone just sat on your head and squeaked one out. Imagine if Best Buy's in-store cashiers hit every customer in the back of the knees with a shovel as they left. That's what my online experience was like.
The deals on the website are great, much better than the prices in their stores. I was in the market for a new cellphone, so I bought a Motorola RAZR V3 from their site. It was a steal at $69.99. However, as Tom Waits once said, "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away".
The company that handles cellphone sales for Best Buy's website is able to get great deals for a reason: they run a full credit check on every customer. A full credit check that takes 3-5 days to finish. There's no chance a customer will skip out on a bill and cost a cellphone provider money, because the company does everything short of coming to the homes of its customers and checking their wallets. To buy a phone, you must give them your social security number, driver's license number, employer's name, bust size/penis circumference, favorite color, three least favorite sexual partners, grandmother's chocolate scotcheroos recipe, and a nude picture of yourself sticking your finger into your own asshole.
Luckily, it's a secure website, so I don't have to worry about hackers stealing the picture of me giving myself "the reach around".
But that's not all. You know the rebate? The $230 one that makes the phone $70 instead of $300? You don't just send in a receipt and a form. You have to send in your first three months worth of phone bills. Then it takes the usual 8-10 weeks for processing, meaning I won't be getting my money back until next March at the earliest.
Do I get to earn interest on this investment? Seriously, are they running a bank? It's a sneaky way to run a bank without paying interest rates, isn't it?
So now I sit here, robbed of $300 and my dignity, waiting for my phone. With the credit check and Fedex shipping, I expect it to get here around my eightieth birthday. It'll be obsolete by then, but I'll be senile and will enjoy it because it's shiny.
And to think, with the addition of the outrageous $10 shipping and handling fee, it only would've been $20 more to go to the damn store and get the phone immediately.
I was duped.
Don't buy anything from Best Buy's online store. They'll treat you like a hobo trying to buy toilet paper on layaway. If you value your own sanity, stay away. The small print is enough to make you want to go back to using a rotary phone.
