Best Buy creates scam site to trick customers
So Best Buy was apparently caught red-handed screwing over its customers.
George Gombossy of the Hartford Courant gets the major-league kudos for exposing this.
(And Gnomic gets a hat tip from me for pointing it out!)
See, Best Buy had a secret intranet it used to trick customers. Note that the word is intranet
— that is, an internal Web site.
According to Gombossy, if a customer went to a sales person and commented that he thought such-and-such
an item was cheaper online, the sales guy would pull up a Web site that looked like the real Best Buy Web site, but
was in fact an internal site where the prices were higher.
…even when one informs a salesperson of the Internet price, customers have been shown
the intranet site, which looks identical to the Internet site, but does not always show the lowest price.
Thus the sales guy could say something like, “Actually, sir, it’s more expensive
on the Web.” You had to be the kind of person who would either A) print out the Web page and bring it in to the store,
or B) check the price online when you got home.
Based on what his office has learned, [Connecticut State Attorney General Richard] Blumenthal
said, it appears the consumer has the burden of informing Best Buy sales people of the cheaper price listed on its Internet
site, which he said “is troubling.”
Further, Best Buy had denied that such a site existed.
What I want to know is, has Best Buy also created spoofs of its competitors’ sites? That
way, a sales guy could say, “Let’s see what Circuit City has it for” and pull up a higher — but fake
— price.
That would make the customer think Best Buy had better prices, and the store could avoid
matching a competitor’s price.
Hmm.
