Best Buy Sucks

It's easy to get bad service at Best Buy. Based on a random sampling of stores in Wisconsin, Boston and Santa Rosa, Calif., it's not just a fluke; it's company policy. Dazed clerks wander the floor, avoiding customers like vegans dodge veal. No one knows where anything is. Customer service queries go unanswered, or get escalated through a complicated in-store hierarchy that seemingly stops at Saint Peter before anything authoritative comes back down.

And always with the damned Performance Service Plans! Haven't you people ever heard of manufacturer's warranties? That'll be plenty, thanks.

If you've ever shopped at Best Buy — and at this point, most of us have, and probably will again — there is a website that tells the full story.

Bestbuysucks.org contains some positive comments about the store (one favorite: "My only comment to employees is this: Stop your winning"). But the site is largely a chronicle of complaints and outrages, catalogued by the month and filed both customers and employees alike. Founded in 1998 by a former employee who felt he'd been subjected to sexual harassment on the job, it has a sprawling collection of archives, presented in plain text. The examples from this review — copious in quantity, and cut down from a much larger initial pool — are mostly drawn from the August 2002 archive.

The customers are just consumers like you or me, and they're venting steam. But just reading the way the employees start up their complaints is revealing, and it gets you in the mood to hear their secret saga.

Hello everyone. I work at store number 4, in MInnesota.

As a now ex-employee of Bestbuy 568 I thought i would write a couple of comments about what I experienced at the store.

Well, to the ones still there at 568... keep your chins up and your backs to the wall cause you never know whos gonna stab you next......

Wahoo!!! #339's Numbers are in the gutter and destined to stay that way.

Hello all. I worked at store 577 in Oxford Valley, Pa.

What a load of $%&^*! Store #512 YOU SUCK! What's "My Best Buy" you ask? Well it's a burnt down Best Buy!!!

It's the Best Buy roll call of the damned, a series of shout-outs to and from homies trapped in a miserable crew. Numbers, not names; geographic areas shouting out litanies of pain, rage and humiliation.

The employee testimonials housed on Bestbuysux.org are funny, in the same way that A Clockwork Orange was funny. They're amusing, the same way Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was amusing. These people are in real, highly detailed pain.

They talk about thievery and betrayal:

So, off I go to 389 in Lithonia, GA. A store that was only open for 4 months and already had a shrink trend of .51! HELLO, can we say Employee Theft? Here is where I learned what two-faced really means. I was being told that I was doing a great job to my face, yet behind myback managers were discussing how to get rid of me.

They complain about sexual antics:

The only time the store was reasonably running well was when there was a GM who maybe was a little too close to some of the younger female employees and was involved with some type of extracurricular activities with these girls. This says a whole hell of a lot about the management level personnel in Best Buy.

And they document in-store purges:

Well it's happened! Someone saw my post about Store #246 and how it stinks. They have all but launched an investigation into who the "troublemaker" is.

But some good may have come out of my posting on this page. Within one or two days after someone from my store saw my other post the managers started handing out papers asking for our ideas on how to make the store better. They have started asking us if anyone else thought they were that bad. Many said yes. Some said no.

I'm sure this post will be brought up at our next employee gripe session.

Anyways I want to thank this site for allowing this girl to vent.

Peace out.
xoxo

Hey all, I'm back, but this time as a former BB 443 employee. I was fired this past Thursday for, of all things, writing to this website!!! Yes, they couldn't get me for anything else so they fired me for posting here. Their explanation was that it was a violation of "ethics". Hell, if they're going to pull that shit they might as well fire the whole store!

Granted, the store has 80,000 employees and 400 locations. There's bound to be some bad blood. But what's remarkable about Bestbuysux.org's immense load of material — and, hoo-boy, there's quite a lot of it — is the one über-theme that rises to the surface.

It's all about the numbers. In the rabid pursuit of sales, the people — both customers and employees — have been forgotten.

One particularly heart-wrenching tale describes the breakdown of bilingual customer service:

i was actually just fired this afternoon, 7-9-02, for being insubordinate as they labeled it. this is all categorized from my performance this past sunday, where a nice spanish-only-speaking lady politely asked if i spoke spanish. of course i replied yes, and proceeded to try and help her. it seems she was possibly interested in the BB card with their stupid credit care and mastercard. she then asked for help with the product her and her husband were interested in. while interacting with her and her family, which would've been a $2000 sale with all the extra warranties and stuff, a manager proceedes to wave to get my attention, and says you are needed up front, not back here. then, as i'm walking up to front with him the customer says that they'll just go elsewhere if he won't let me finish, and he sais that this is america and we speak english here. being puerto rican, i took it to heart and told him they are customers too, and wouldn't like it if he were somewhere where he didn't speak the language.

Anyone familiar with Fight Club (or, hey, Franz Kafka) will immediately groove to the pain that pours forth from the anonymous Best Buy multitudes. After reading five or six employee complaints, you begin to think that it's more than just minimum wagers bitching and moaning. After 10 or 15, you start to understand the dirty underside of working for a relentless American corporation. And after about 25, you want to walk through the doors of your neighborhood location, locate the nearest boy (or girl) in blue and give him or her a long hug.

Americans shop at stores like Best Buy dozens of times a year. We walk in the doors, look for our Toshiba flat-screen television, and God have mercy on the poor 19-year-old fool who can't point us to exactly the model we have in mind. Reading Bestbuysux.org peels back the exterior of this buzzing hive of corporate enterprise and reveals the shit and mud behind the exterior.

Even if the company's dirty laundry wasn't so consistently tragicomic, the site would be a must-read — how many of us think about the poor souls who wear the blue shirts? If they stick with it, all they've got is Bestbuysux.org, an employee discount and each other's company. But the lucky ones escape.

I'll miss my discount, but I'm free
Free at Last... Thank God I'm Free at Last

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)