Best Buy Offers Bogus "3D Sync" Service 248
Token_Internet_Girl writes "Fewer than two weeks after Best Buy offered the first Full 3D HDTVs for sale in the US, its latest Sunday circular (3/21/10) promotes a Samsung 3D TV deal consisting of a 55" 3D TV, 3D capable Blu-ray player, 2 pairs of glasses, a Blu-ray movie and Geek Squad delivery and installation. The ad states the service includes TV and Blu-ray player set-up, connection to your wireless network and 'sync your 3D glasses for an amazing experience.' The package price lists the 'geek' services as a $150 value. The offer's only problem is that there is no such thing as syncing 3D glasses. They sync automatically." Here's Best Buy Corporate's response to this hilarity.
Re:After reading best buy awsner... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Poor choice of verb. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe, if this was an isolated incident with Best Buy. But a quick search on Best Buy, Geek Squad, and Ripoff will get quite a few hits. I'd love to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but this is a bit of a pattern with them.
The margins on selling electronics are painfully thin (ask CircuitCity). Creating a misleading "oh but that's not how we meant it" as they sell low value for the money services is a common thread for electronics retailers.
The simplest answer is probably the right one (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Poor choice of verb. (Score:5, Interesting)
Read the article not just the blurb....
"HD Guru called three Best Buy stores. After confirming each employee received training on 3D TVs and installation services, we asked them to explain the process of “syncing” the 3D glasses. We received three different but oddly similar responses.
Blue shirt one said the glasses need to be synced with the Blu-ray player. The second geek referred to the 3D glasses needing to sync to the player via the USB port within the glasses, an impossible feat as there is no USB port on the glasses. The third stated the need to acquire the glasses’ IP address to sync with the Blu-ray player. There is no IP address for 3D glasses; they have no connectivity to the Internet or network. The Samsung battery powered glasses “sync” to the 3D content wirelessly via an infra-red pulse emitted by the TV."
Best Buy has a consistent record of the same issue. How you choose to look at it is one of three things. 1. Their "experts" are worthless and don't know anything, 2. They are intentional trying to defraud consumers, or 3, they assume consumers are all retarded and wouldn't understand something explained to them in clear English. You can choose the one you want to believe. One or all of them are true.
Features - Advantages - Benefits (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's how marketing people work...
They identify the features of a product, translate that into an advantage, then translate that into a benefit.
People buy benefits, they don't buy features (most people anyway).
So, if you have some commercial software package that zips the reports, it might go like this:
Feature: zip tool
Advantage: compress and encrypt
Benefit: Secure and quickly transmit your reports
In this case, they're trying to justify their Geek setup services:
Feature: 3d glasses delivery and setup
Advantage: not worrying about compatibility
Benefit: Sync your 3D glasses to your TV
Sure, it's not accurate, but marketing people don't always know the fine details of what they are talking about. If they did, they would be techies.
As programmers/developers/techies, we hate to deal in Benefits. They are so hard to quantify and define. We like to deal in features, which can be validated (it's there and it works, or it's not there or doesn't work).
Re:Poor choice of verb. (Score:3, Interesting)
Same deal as when Best Buy offers to take your money so the Geek Squad can install your new XBox 360 game... and this was before it was possible to install to HDD.
Re:Poor choice of verb. (Score:4, Interesting)
Best Buy does bother with training. They train their employees on how to scam you. [consumerist.com]
Re:Poor choice of verb. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Poor choice of verb. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Best Buy, not the best at all (Score:3, Interesting)
Every single item in the ad has an ad minimum listed next to it. Every single store has at least that many of the item on hand on Sunday morning.
There are seriously people waiting outside of many Best Buy's on Sunday morning for them to open in order to snag all of the ad product.
It's not a scam, it's vultures.
--Former Best Buy employee (with little love left for them, but even less left for FUD)
Re:lol (Score:1, Interesting)
3D TV = Laser disc.
10 years from now we'll see these things sitting in goodwill and laugh our asses off.
Insightful? Laserdisks survived 25 years and were extremely popular among hardcore film fans. I still wish I had my Laser collection, it paid rent one month. Look at it this way it out lived 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy disks combined as a format and there are still laser fans. It was a fantastic format and many of the specialty disks still were far better than any DVD I've ever seen. Just because the format is no longer supported doesn't mean it was a bad idea. I watched some stunning images and sound while all the "smart" people were watching VHS tapes. I'm not a fan of 3D TV but I'll always be a laserdisk fan.
Re:Nothing New...Same Best Buy Different Product (Score:1, Interesting)
You're making a mistake. Shops such as these are not trying to sell the thing you want to buy. They're trying to sell the high-profit spurious crap that goes with them.
All shops such as this have targets to meet. They need to make sure that x per cent of their stuff is sold with the add-ons. They get a bonus the higher the ratio of product:crap.
If they sell 100 laptops a week, but only 50 of them have the added insurance or "optimisation" or installation or whatever, they get 50% and a stern telling off.
If they sell 50 laptops in a week but all 50 of them have a high-profit bolt on, they get 100% and a hefty bonus. The employees will get MUCH more money for selling fewer products if a higher percentage of what they actually do sell has the bolt-on.
I used to work for Time Computers - for approximately 2 weeks back in the late 90's - as a sales monkey. The wheezes there were astonishing. You'd sell a desktop for £1,500, but the punter didn't want the insurance. So - you'd start typing their details into the sales computer and one of your colleagues would sneak out to the router and pull the plug for your PC, giving a nice "CONNECTION LOST" message on screen. You'd tilt the monitor to the punter and say "ah, right.... We seem to be having trouble" - you'd go out the back and make a big show of calling your area manager - pretend, of course - shouting at him about how you were losing sales because the network guys/telco/whoever were being incompetent. You'd then wrap up saying that something outside of your control had happened; they could either come back the next day when the system was back up, or they could dial the call-centre direct on the 0845 number - here, use our phone. That way the call-centre got the "no-profit" sale, not our shop. Not surprisingly, I got another job as soon as I could.
Re:Poor choice of verb. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think this was a deliberate attempt to defraud customers as much as it was a poor choice of verb.
"Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest." -me
I think it IS a rippff after talking to Bill. Bill's a fellow a few years older than me, and is your typical computer user -- he doesn't know much about his computer at all. Well, he bought a multimedia computer from Best Buy so he could use HDMI to watch youtube on his hi-def TV (Bill's obviously got money since he drives a six month old Caddilac). After the first Windows update the sound stopped working, so he took it back to Best Buy thinking he's get it fixed under warrantee. Nope; it's a "software problem" and the warrantee doesn't cover it. He paid $130, and when he told me about it I knew exactly what had gone wrong -- Microsoft had replaced a perfectly good driver with one that didn't work at all. This isn't uncommon, and I suspect happens a lot, since the same thing happened to me when I upgraded to XP several years ago and Windows replaced a perfectly good NIC driver with a nonfunctioning one. Unlike Bill, I'm a nerd so the update didn't cost me anything but some head scratching and deductive reasoning.
I told him the next time it happens, call me and I'll save him $130. It wouldn't have taken Best Buy five minutes to replace the crap driver, and they could have just told him how to do it himself instead of taking advantage of his ignorance and defrauding him of $130. Bill's not stupid, just ignorant about computers.
Toyota owners ought to be glad their warrantee doesn't exclude software, like a computer does. But at any rate, I believe Best Buy uses the warrantee limitations to defraud their own customers. This was no mistake; they profit handsomely from this "mistake".
One last word here -- someone with money and Linux expertise could make a fortune, preloading a newbie-friendly OS like Ubantu or Mandriva on a PC and selling it with a warrantee that covers the software that comes with the computer.
There is no excuse for software to not be warranted. Best Buy is run by thieves and fraudsters; you continually hear about frauds perpetrated by Best Buy on their customers; it wasn't long ago they got caught selling returned merchandise as new, often missing items that should have been included and were marked on the box as being included (e.g., diskman-like CD players lacking headphones, TVs lacking remotes, etc).
Whoever said "you get what you pay for" never bought anything from Best Buy.