Best Buy will not honor $9.99 HDTV deal

[David Baxter PhD]

Best Buy will not honor $9.99 HDTV deal
by Andrew Nusca
August 13th, 2009

Best Buy?s Web site offered a 52-inch TV for less than $10 yesterday, but the deal was too good to be true.

Early Wednesday morning, BestBuy.com listed a 52-in. Samsung LN52A650 LCD HDTV for $9.99 ? more than $1,600 off the $1,799 sticker price (itself nearly half off a $3,399 list price).

But roughly 45 minutes after customers caught wind of the deal and began ordering them, Best Buy admitted the ?pricing error? and made the product unavailable.

?We will not be placing any more orders for this unit,? a customer service voicemail declared.

Customers who managed to sneak one or multiple orders into that brief morning Window were left wondering if they got away with the deal.

The answer: nope.

In a statement, Best Buy apologized for the mistake but said it would ?not be honoring the incorrect price.?

Read the full story

 

[Daniel E.]

itself nearly half off a $3,399 list price.

That's chunk change...a small price to pay for heaven on earth

 

[Fiver]

I'm by far NOT the biggest fan of Best To Go Buy Stuff Somewhere Else and will go out of my way to avoid the entire corporation, but I've worked retail my entire life and things like this happen. When you're talking about a small amount of money, maybe ten or twenty percent of the retail price that makes up the difference of the error, it's often in the store's favour to give it to an individual customer at the posted (incorrect) price to maintain a good relationship, and to keep a customer who remembers these things. But on a grand scale? No way. Not even an individual error of this magnitude needs to be honoured (at least in the US) nor should it.

On one hand, I enjoy seeing stories where BB gets a chunk bitten out of its ass because of how many mores stories there are of how they screw their customers. But this was a human error somewhere down the line, and one for which someone will probably lose their job.

Ironically, it'll probably be the best thing that could have happened to that person.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

I actually like Best Buy.