Best Buy; Worst Customer Service

Those of you who follow me on Twitter probably knew this post was coming. So a few weeks ago the screen on my digital camera broke, and for a while I’ve been using a backup that isn’t really mine, but with my family vacation coming up, I knew I had to buy a new one. And the lens was already messed up (thank you, Masked Emotions), so it’s not like this purchase wasn’t a long time coming anyway.

Since my damaged digital camera had been working just fine, I decided I would just upgrade to the next model up, which was pretty affordable. I had a gift card to Best Buy, so I figured that would counter some of the expense anyway.

So I walked into the store knowing exactly which camera I wanted. However, since it’s a digital camera, you can’t just walk in, grab it, and take it to the checkout line (if it were that easy, I would have been in and out in about a minute). No, you need to wait for one of the workers to notice you so that you can tell them to unlock the cabinet so that they can grab it for you. Sure, I suppose I understand that, since some of these cameras are pretty expensive (of course they have other equally expensive appliances just lounging around the store).

This is all fine and good, except they had anywhere between one and three workers in the camera area. For the most part it was just one guy, and every single person who got to this guy before me would ask a million questions about all these cameras and camcorders. Honestly, every single person was like, “What about this one? Is this one better? What does this one do?” I’m not faulting these people for having questions – or this worker for helping them – but there should really be an easier way for you to just grab a camera when you know what you want. Making matters worse, there was only ONE SET of keys for the cabinets, so even when two other people were there to help, all three of them were sharing the same set of keys.

I was there for nearly an hour, and it really should’ve been a five minute mission. Once somebody did come over to help me, I was in and out in less than 10 minutes. And that includes waiting on line and listening to the cashier try to sell me every possible protection plan. It really was a dreadful experience and it’s absolutely ridiculous that Best Buy has such crappy customer service (and before you say there was a shortage of workers, there were a plethora of people restocking shelves. None of which ever looked up to assist a customer).

So yeah, won’t be shopping there for a while.