Best Buy = Worst Nightmare
I had been a Best Buy customer for many years with purchases well over hundreds of thousands of dollars - but that was largely because I didn't need any service from them in the past. Late last year, my wife and I WENT THUR HELL with Best Buy in the process of replacing a broken cooktop.
In Nov last year, our 20-year old cooktop went dark. We spent over $2K on a Jen-air cooktop at Best Buy's Pacific Sales to replace our dead one. I did call up a few local appliance stores like University Electric Western Appliances, etc. It turns out that every store sells these premium brands at the same prices. All of them can order and install them within 3 - 5 days except Best Buy who promised to try their best. We went with Best Buy because sales person insisted that BB had the best service on installation. We believed him! Boy, how wrong that was - we committed a 30-day nightmare!
First, it took over 25 days before Best Buy could even schedule to install the cooktop!
Even we called and emailed the sales guy every day on the status of our order and installation. It was delayed week after week. In the meanwhile, our kitchen was down. We had to eat out or microwave every meal every day!
Then COPS SHOWED UP during installation!!!
On the day of this very delayed installation, I waited them for 4 hours (their installation window) but no one showed so I left for work. 6-hour after the schedule time, the installers showed up with only my wife at home. The installers quickly realized that my wife doesn't know much about home improvement and told her that the cooktop could not be installed because of the existing vent location. So I got on the phone with them and told them that was not true as I had already measured everything based on the online manual of the product.
So I asked them to wait for me as my work is only 10 min away from home. They reluctantly agreed and complained to me that they were not supposed to work that day and had too many installations - the truth came out. Then half way getting home, my wife called and said that the installers simply wanted to leave. I told my wife to convince them to wait as I was only 5 min away, or leave the cooktop as we paid both product and installation a month earlier.
What waited for next was simply unbelievable: I got home and saw the two big installation guys arguing with my wife and refused to install or leave the product with us. Instead, THEY CALLED COPS, claiming my wife (a petite woman) was holding two big men hostage at my home (or on my driveway technically). I lived in a wealthy town in the hills. Two sheriffs came right after me. After hearing what happened, the cops were dumbfounded, and they were mad at the installers' behaviors that they filed an incident report on the two installers Brent and Frederick. If we were to sue Best Buy, the cops and report would be the evidence for their abusive behaviors in addition to refusal for the installation work.
The NIGHTMARE CONTINUES even after Best Buy management was involved!
At this point, we couldn't really work with these two terrible installers. We escalated to the store managers who were all nice and very sympathetic to our encounter. But none of them had any power to make things happen. Their earliest next installation time would be another 10-day away. On top of that, the two bad installers took our cooktop back to their warehouse 100 miles away. So we couldn't even hire our own installer to get our kitchen back. It took me another a week, 30 hours of calls and store visits just to get the product to the store.
Ironically, it only took me and my contractor less than 2 hours to pick up the cooktop from the store and installed it without any problem. Before that, Best Buy wasted 30 days of time, 40 hours of escalation plus the emotional disturbance from the Best Buy installers foul-crying of being held hostages!
After this incredible saga, the store managers and the sales person told that we'd be well compensated for my loss by the corporate. After several interactions with Jess from Minneapolis, we got NOTHING while our time and emotion loss were priceless.
So DON'T be a fool like me. DO NOT BUY from Best Buy! For standard electronics products, get them from Amazon with great pricing and service. For premium products, it's better go with local appliance stores. I'll never walk into Best Buy store in my life! read more