Best Buy: bait & switch investigated

[Dr Mordrid]

BB's private intranet site used in the stores shows different prices than their public website, allowing them to tell customers that sales are over when they aren't.

Story....

Best Buy Admits Secret Web Site

United Press International

U.S. consumer-electronics giant Best Buy Inc. has a secret Web site that can block customers from getting the lowest prices, a published report said Friday.

A company spokesman who first denied its existence acknowledged it was real after being contacted by the Connecticut attorney general, The Hartford (Conn.) Courant reported.

Best Buy is cooperating fully with the attorney general's investigation, spokesman Justin Barber said.

When in-store customers inform Best Buy sales people of a cheaper price on BestBuy.com, they can be shown an internal Web site, which looks identical to the public Web site but does not always show the lowest price, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said.

Best Buy of Minneapolis insisted its policy was to give customers the best price.

"Although we have an intra-store Web site in place to support store operations (including products and pricing), we are reminding our employees how to access the external BestBuy.com Web site to ensure customers are receiving the best possible product price", the company said in a statement.

Uhhhh....yeah.....and Al Gore invented the internet

Lesson: print out those sale ads from their public website before going to the store.

[GT98]

I dont see what the big deal is...its a lack of training and information flow to the store employee's not explaining the differences between the company's Intranet website vs the public one.

[Gurm]

I dont see what the big deal is...its a lack of training and information flow to the store employee's not explaining the differences between the company's Intranet website vs the public one.

Or maybe it's corporate malfeasance, purposely not putting sale prices up on the internal site...

[Elie]

i would agree with Gurm, I think this was intentional!

[ND66]

Or maybe it's corporate malfeasance, purposely not putting sale prices up on the internal site...

..... hoping that once you get there, you'll buy it anyway????


.

[MultimediaMan]

In the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts this is a BIG deal due to some of their truth-in-advertising/ price-as-marked laws.

Basically, the laws say that all items for sale in a retail store must either have a price tag on them or a certain number of Price Checking Devices (which can print a hard copy of the item's price) per square foot of store. The Law goes beyond the mere presence of the devices; These price checking devices must also be in operational condition to meet the standards of the law. All items must be consistently priced and price checking devices must pull and print the same data or risk running afoul of these laws. Auditors in Connecticut can fine a store on the spot for failing any of their compliance tests.

Several years ago, we had to hustle to add a bunch of price verifiers with printers in our stores in those two states as the laws had just gone into effect (2003 time frame). There was a very detailed automated monitoring system put into place which made sure the price checking devices were online and stocked with paper. For a time, I think we were the only retail chain in full compliance with those laws.

Anyway, if what the Connecticut AG is investigating, you can be sure he smells a money-stuffed rat.

[Dr Mordrid]

ND66: Precisely.

3M: It would be a huge deal in Michigan too as we have similar, if not stronger, truth in advertising laws.