Do You Want Best Buy Opening Your New Laptop?

An anonymous reader writes "I went to Best Buy the other day to get a new laptop for a client. I didn't realize till I got it home that they had broken the seal and opened the box. They put a sticker on the box that said, 'Inspected by Best Buy.' I found they had created the user profile, recovery disks, and installed a trial of Trend Antivirus. Seems to me this is more of a marketing agenda than inspection."

For some time now

[ohcrapitssteve]

Back in highschool, I worked in Geek Squad before it was called Geek Squad (we just wore black polo shirts instead of blue, and we were called "Tech Services") and can confirm they've been doing this for more than a decade now.

Check your receipt

[Anonymous Coward]

This was standard practice when I had the unfortunate experience of working for Geek Squad. They would have us do some 'pre-setup' units that would also have a 'pre-installed services' bundle attached at the register.

If it was the only unit left, and you didn't want this service, you could get them to remove the cost by complaining, but otherwise they'd get you a unit that wasn't 'pre-setup'.

Of course they're going to hand you the pre-setup one if you dont specify, and don't check...

I used to work for Geek Squad..

[intellitech]

I used to work for Best Buy Geek Squad (about 3 years ago, and for almost 5 years before that), starting when I was a sophomore in high school. And, I do hear this a lot, but not every "kid" that worked for a big box electronic store was terrible at their job. Geek Squad, yes, I know, I know. But that was a different time for me, so don't hate on it too much.

Anyway, I can personally tell you that we saw at least 1 DOA laptop for every 20 we sold (a certain brand or two I won't name that sold for cheap accounted for most of them). That being said, customers, especially the grumpy I'm-entitled-to-everything suburban kind, do not like getting home, opening their new laptop, and seeing either a blue screen or nothing at all. It pissed off the customer, and then usually the store ends up losing more money because of people who demand to be compensated for the time they spent bring the computer back to the store. Remember, computers don't have a high profit margin, so giving away anything more than 5-10% on a computer which usually end up in a loss for the store. You may have your qualms with this practice, but it keeps their average customer satisfaction up.

Now, in addition to that, I would also like to point out that when I was working for Geek Squad, we weren't installing trial versions of anything on there. In fact, back in the day, we used to do a free performance upgrade (registry fixes, bloatware startup-item removal, etc). I'm not sure why this particular part of the process has changed, but I'm sure there's a marketing reason for it.

Besides, the only people this would really irk is the extreme power user crowd (us), and most of us are wise enough (hopefully) to buy our electronics elsewhere, anyway.