Since 2004, my wife and I have have frequented a single location Best Buy in Murray, Utah, for everything we've needed in electronics for our house or gifts. So, for 8 years we've purchased 3-flat panel Sony HD TV's, I bought a $1,000 Canon camera and a $500 2nd lens recently, four complete desktop computer workstations over the years, 3 graphic card upgrades, 2 sound card upgrades, a power supply, 2 vacuum cleaners(!) and probably 5 or 6 Ipods of various models and functions.
So, a week ago, I walked in with what we suspected was a blown-up graphics card that we had purchased at that store, but there was no warranty. I asked the Geek desk dude if he could 'test' the card to see if it was blown so I could walk over to the aisle and buy another one. I had a new 450 watt power supply off their shelves under my arm when I askled for help with a product (graphics card) I had purchased at BB.
A rather uninterested man looked at the old card and said,"Well, I could test it, but I would have to charge you $40." When I asked him why he would charge a good customer like me $40 if I promised to buy a new one right there on the spot, he said because he would have to "take apart a computer (open the case) and r-e-m-o-v-e the old graphics card and put mine in and then "put the computer back together" (close the case) and then, in his words, "reformat the computer to run your card." I said I just needed to see if the card was dead and this idiot went back to his internal script about charging me $40. So, it wasn't that he couldn't do it in 5 minutes, it was that he was going to charge me $40 come h*ll or high water.
Then things got even worse: I asked if there was any other way for us to find out if the card we had purchased right there was any good before wasting any more time and he said, with a straight face, that I could go across the street to PC Laptops store, a competitor, and he was sure they had a gizmo to test my card. I looked in disbelief at him and asked,"Should I buy a graphics card from them if this one's bad?" He said, without skipping a beat, that it was my choice. I said in increasing disbelief, "Should I buy this power supply under my arm from them, as well?"
And he actually shrugged his shoulders and said to me and my son,"Well, that's up to you, sir." I reported him to the store manager about three days later when I went in to buy another desktop. The manager said that there was nothing he could do and agreed that the Geek was way off base and that he was "going to talk to him," not about charging me $40, but for sending me out the door on $250-$300 worth of BB business.
Why do they even have the Geeks? The online rep is awful, their customer service skills are non-existent and I can attest that the biggest frustrations and disappointments I've had over the years (some of the biggest laughs that weren't funny) have been at the hands of the Geek Squad , a seemingly independent operation within Best Buy stores that doesn't seem to have an ounce of accountability, no matter how badly they screw something up.
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