Ok. So here’s another article about Best Buy. If they were so bad, why did I go there? They’re not bad. They’re convenient and they just need some help. They need to think about how to address certain types of customers.
My daughter graduated last Saturday from college. She’s going to another college to pursue another degree and asked for a new laptop for a graduation gift.
After lunch my family, parents and uncle walked in to Best Buy to see what they had. I was specifically looking for the Lenovo Yoga. It’s a hybrid laptop that I had gotten my wife last Christmas. Nice. Fully laptop and full tablet, with keyboard bent back behind screen. SSD drive instead of typical hard drive and light for it’s large 13″ screen.
We saw that they had one. It was the last one. And it was open box. So, it was discounted. Nice. No box or manuals or such, but they typically don’t come with much. AC Adapter included, of course. But, we didn’t know if we could buy it and it was attached to an alarm as it was on display.
We looked around and saw a lot of blue shirts. Those with blue polo shirts are usually employees. So, remember not to wear one to Best Buy :). They looked busy. There were some vendor reps there. One finally noticed us standing around and said she’d help us. Well, this meant finding someone with a blue shirt. That person arrived with a tablet in hand and put us on a waiting list. Ok. So, there’s some order. However, we noticed that several non-blue shirted vendor reps were standing around doing nothing. And then we noticed a few blue shirts doing the same – including the guy taking names with the tablet.
So, when the store is this busy, the Best Buy staff stay in their dedicated roles and can’t help. We didn’t have questions. We knew what we wanted. We just wanted to pay for it and get out of that madhouse. None of the staff took any initiative to help or identify that we didn’t want a tutorial – just to pay for the darn thing.
Sigh. I made a comment out loud about how much easier this would be to do online. Another customer seconded my remark. My uncle asked the blue shirt taking names if it would help to talk to the manager. The blue shirt said he already had and implied it wouldn’t do any good.
We eventually got out of there with the laptop. But it was such a chore! Retail shopping should be easy! Even for those that don’t need to kick the tires.