Best Buy? Not so much.

So, three days before Christmas finds us in our friendly neighbourhood Best Buy. We went in looking for… not sure what… but the idea of an iPad was sitting near the front of our mind. Problem is, iPads are stupidly expensive (and I have given Apple quite enough cash this year). The other tablet we had in mind was the Asus EEE Transformer and there was a very helpful staff member who walked us through everything and when we asked, “How many do you have on hand?” he eyeballed the stock and said, “Looks like plenty.”

He excused himself to help another customer while we made our decision — at $399 for the 16GB we could get almost 2 for the price of one 16GB iPad ($649) — and that was the plan, to get two. We looked around to find our sales staffer but he was involved with another couple. Another sales staffer showed up and unlocked the stock cabinet we were still standing in front of (via keys from a manager) for another customer, getting her the same item we were looking for.

“No problem,” I thought, “they have plenty available and we don’t have to be asshats about it.”

We asked him to retrieve stock for us but neither he nor the manager standing watch over the keys was willing/able to do that so while that he went to finish the sale (and the key holder disappeared into the mists), we looked around for someone else.

We noticed two staffers were having a conversation over by the iPads so we asked if one of them could be sent over. One did come over but he was confused (eventually giving us his name as almost an apology) and it took a couple of minutes for him to figure out what we wanted — he, and apparently everyone else, thought we had already been helped. However, he finally clued in and paged someone to get keys (so there’s only one manager type with keys?).

So we waited a few more minutes for the key.

Which didn’t fit.

So we waited even longer for an alternate key to be located.

Once the cabinet was opened, we were dismayed to find that there were no more in stock of the model we wanted; the last one had been sold 20 minutes earlier when we should have said, “Hey we were here first” but didn’t.

There was one open box model that had extra components (16GB plus keyboard) for the same price  and there was a 32GB for an extra $50 but we really weren’t into spending extra to get what we didn’t want.

Result: Mike put his bank card back in his wallet and we left empty handed after an hour in the store.

I Tweeted that we’d had lousy service and someone replied with a contact name & number for one of the store managers and said they’d emailed this person who would be expecting my call. I called at 3:30…. left a message… and two hours later, no reply.

Yes, I know it’s Christmas and retail is insane. No, these weren’t gifts and we aren’t in a particular panic for them but we were customers and, had the first person actually checked the stock properly, we wouldn’t have wasted a half hour of everyone’s time. Better still, if he had checked and seen there was one left plus the open box, we’d have got those two there and then. Oh well, too bad Best Buy, you lost a sale.

Chances are we’ll buy online or at least wait to see what post-Christmas sales offer.