Best Buy Wants Me Back… Or Do They?

Four years ago I purchased a Pioneer AV Receiver at Best Buy. Yesterday it broke. Now it wasn’t a bargain, and I did like it — but after a…

Four years ago I purchased a Pioneer AV Receiver at Best Buy. Yesterday it broke. Now it wasn’t a bargain, and I did like it — but after a call to Pioneer and a bit of Google research one thing was clear, the cracking and popping meant it was dead. And weeks of repair and hundreds of dollars would only give it half a chance of a new life. Alas, it was dead.

So I wandered on to Amazon thinking I’d order a new unit. Quickly I found that the details overwhelmed the data — and event with lots of checkboxes and user reviews… I was going to need to go and actually touch a unit. 
So off to Best Buy I went. Credit card in hand. I was what every retail store wants, a purchaser that was ‘in-market’.

Quickly I learned a few things; there were cheap AV Receivers ($150–$250) and mid-priced $499 and then there were the snazzy ones $699 and up. Now my last unit was $599, so I was clearly a customer that wasn’t afraid to pay for quality. But most of the newfangled things they were using to sell me I didn’t need. Things like iPhone integration, Bluetooth headphones, network connection, you know gizmos. I read the various price tags, poked around, and then I was ready to have a salesman tell me why I should pay a premium for something fancy.

I asked the first guy walking by if he could help me. “Sorry, I don’t work for Best Buy — I work for Magnolia,” he said without so much as slowing his gate. Now, I happen to know what Magnolia is. It’s the high-end AV shop inside Best Buy that is owned by Best Buy. It was about 20 feet away from where I was standing. Hmm… so, rather than see me as an AV Receiver buyer who might be shown something upmarket, I was tagged as not worthy of the “Magnolia” experience. Would I have purchased a 2k AV receiver? Probably not — but now I was most certainly not invited into the hallowed halls of high-end AV.

Next, a sales guy in a white shirt came by. Could he help me? Nope. He worked for LG as a “Brand Ambassador”, he told me I’d need to find a Blue Shirt. After some time, I was able to snag a blue shirt. “What is the difference between the $599 Onkyo and the $199 Sony,” I asked. I readied myself for the full on sales push. But surprisingly — it didn’t come. “Not much, some extra speaker connections, they’re both pretty good,” said the pleasant but distracted Blue Shirt. So I told him, I’ll take the $199 one. He went out back, and returned with the only one they had a $176 ‘open box’ unit. I carried it to the cash register where another ‘white shirt’ woman stood, unable to ring me up. It turns out she may have worked for LG as well. So then, a Blue Shirt arrives, and I’m paid and out.

So, let’s recap. No one at Best Buy asked me what I was going to use the unit for. What peripherals I had. What I’d purchased in the past. What I’d paid for my last unit. There was no attempt to share with me a unit that was cool, awesome, aspirational. There was no attempt to get me excited about a higher end brand. Magnolia was never mentioned. Simply put — there was no attempt to do anything other sell me the cheapest box, with the least amount of effort.

So as Best Buy looked toward the critical holiday season — with more than five hundred stores betting on Oculus VR demos to drive walk in traffic and fire up holiday purchases, one can only hope that they’ve got trained, motivated, enthusiastic Blue Shirts ready to do more than hustle open box receivers out the door.