BestBuy.ca Rant
December 31st, 2008
I’m not, and never will be a big Boxing Day/Week shopper. I don’t like crowds, standing in line, or driving around the Yorkdale parking lot for an hour looking for a space.
However, this year I did find it hard to resist some of the online bargains that were available. For a few weeks now, I’ve been meaning to upgrade the RAM in my MacBook (especially since upgrading to Adobe CS4), and BestBuy had 2GB chips on sale for $29.99.
I’m sold. I add 2 of the chips to my cart, and click checkout. I’m then prompted to login. Now I face the perplexing question, which I face on a near daily basis: “Have I already registered here?”. I’m fairly certain I have, so I begin to work my way through attempting to login with one of my 5 email accounts, and 4-5 standard passwords I use. If your finite math isn’t so hot, that’s a lot of permutations. So far, this poor experience is all my fault, and an issue I really need to figure out how to deal with.
When I finally login it starts to get interesting. I’m notified that for my privacy and security my order history has been temporarily deleted. Ok, I find this a little odd, but I don’t really care about my order history, I just want to order new RAM, so once again I click on my cart, and then checkout. I’m now returned to the security notice. When they said they had temporarily deleted my order history, what they really meant was they had disabled the whole account. My options are 1) enter a past order number to recover my history (if I had a record of my past orders why would I care about being able to recover it here?), or 2) create a new account. Create a new account?! I just signed into my account. For my “privacy” they want me to re-enter all my account, billing, and shipping information?
Wanting to avoid option two, I open up gmail and search for a past order. Astonishingly, I find a thread of emails from Best Buy detailing my last experience with ordering through their website. I had forgotten about this. In short, the last experience, I had ordered an item on sale and opted to use the Pick Up option, instead of having it shipped. Despite selecting a pick up location where they supposedly had ample supply, I received another email several days later saying they couldn’t honour the order, and that I could no longer get the sale price.
At this point, fuming over the past incident, I’m starting to think this is less and less a great deal. But sadly, my distaste for standing in line prevails, I enter the order number, recover my account, and order the RAM. Let’s hope it shows up this time.
Have you ever given your business to a company begrudgingly? Seems like it’s happening to me a lot lately…Rogers comes to mind.
