If you know me at all, you know how much I hate Best Buy.
It all started with the simple stuff: their Duluth, Georgia store used to have a single cashier for all 40 people waiting in line, so it took you longer to actually check out than it did to listen to the CD you just purchased. Then they started pushing their replacement plans for almost anything (I once had a cashier try to sell me a $6 replacement plan for a $20 CD player!). Then they started with the magazine subscriptions (in several instances, cashiers felt so pressured by management to sell subscriptions that they signed up customers for them anyway, even though they declined). Then Best Buy bought Geek Squad and customers reported being charged hundreds of dollars to fix computer issues that would take me (at most) five minutes. Oh, and let’s not forget Geek Squad employees peeking on female customers in the shower, rifling through customer’s personal desks, and copying their personal data to websites and thumb drives. And then there were the amusing stories, like the guy that tried to pay for a car stereo installation (which was supposed to have been free) with 32 $2 bills and was arrested because the cashier thought they were counterfeits!
But this story… well, it just takes the damn cake. A Consumerist reader from Charlotte, NC took his father to “the newest” Best Buy in town (is that Northlake Mall? Any Charlotteans out there that can verify this?). At the store, he saw a demonstration of Best Buy’s optional (but heavily pushed) “TV calibration service”. Robert reported that one TV looked beautiful, while the other was soft and grainy. It took him a second, but he figured it out: the “calibrated” TV was showing ESPN HD while the “non calibrated” TV was showing a stretched version of ESPN SD! And the reason it took Robert some time to figure it out was because Best Buy had helpfully placed a box advertising their “Black Tie TV Protection Plan” over the lower right side of the SD TV screen, so that customers wouldn’t be able to see the “ESPN” or “ESPN HD” logos! Classy!
When Robert complained to an employee, said employee not only saw nothing amiss with the display, he helpfully added that their calibration service would “decrease power consumption on my TV by 30%”… which is, of course, a flat-out lie.
Look folks, there is such a thing as calibrating your TV. It’s not, strictly speaking, necessary, but it *will* make your TV look slightly better. But don’t pay Best Buy $299 to do it – you can do it yourself with a special “calibration DVD” (available from Amazon for only $22.65 here).
Read the whole sad story here.