I like killing time at Best Buy. I never actually buy anything from them, way overpriced. But when I want to see if something looks like quality or crap it's a good place to go for a demo.

But then I become tempted to buy something.... A few weeks ago I wanted to get a new screen protector for my wife's Samsung Epic. "Can I help you sir?" "Yeah, do you have a screen film for this phone?" "Yes, we have this one with a lifetime warranty for 20 dollars."

Honest Abe. 20 bucks for a fancy piece of scotch tape.

"Oh, we're going broke!!!!" Good.

I'm actually surprised nobody has taken this "showroom" concept to the OBVIOUS next level: a storefront with no backroom inventory, that solicits single sample floor models from various online retailers, and for a set monthly fee, puts a QR code Sticker on each floor model. Maybe even going so far as to team up with Amazon or somebody similar to provide the small manufacturer single-point-of-distribution services.

I went to buy a desktop machine there last year. Irritating enough that I couldn't buy naked metal, but I'm used to the M$ tax. I just don't activate and sell 'em back their OEM license (which requires enough jumping through hoops, Dell makes it practically impossible). Well, the salesman there says "Okay, I'll run this up to the Geek Squad counter so they can activate your copy of Windows and get your machine ready for you". Well, when I told him "no, I'm planning to install Linux on it when I get it home", suddenly I have a problem. Seems it takes a Manager to authorize sale of a PC without the Geek Squad activating Windows (and doing G*D knows what else).

Had to argue with the Manager for twenty minutes before he finally let me buy the PC in the box under factory seal. He seemed to feel that I was going to damage the hardware somehow by my personal incompetence and then hold Best Buy to blame for the damages. I swear, the guy had the I.Q. of a turnip, yet here he was making sure I knew just how foolish and uninformed he thought I was not letting their cast of script-kiddie wannabes manhandle and mangle my machine before I got my hands on it. I suppose over twenty-five years working in the IT industry doesn't qualify me to manage my own hardware and software. *Sigh*

It all fell apart when the Manager insisted I sign a document waiving my warranty because I wouldn't let the Geek Squad play "Solitaire" on it before selling me my hardware (actually, I believe they were interested in activating Windows, running Windows Update, ensuring the Symantec A/V product was installed and updated and setting some default settings which they believe are smarter than the Windows defaults). He really didn't seem to get that even IF I was interested in an antivirus solution it sure as hell wouldn't be Symantec, and he also didn't understand that once installed it damned near takes an act of Congress to get it to uninstall. He also didn't understand that in all probability I'm considerably more qualified than any of their snot-nosed Geek Squad twerps even in the area of Windows System Administration. In short, he didn't get it and kept insisting that I was being foolish.

I ended up buying my host from - brace yourself - Fingerhut, of all places. Sure, I still paid the M$ tax (and spent three months getting my M$ tax refund), but if I'd let the geeks at Best Buy touch it, I wouldn't have been able to do that. And like I said, it's a lot easier not to install Symantec A/V then it is to uninstall it.

As another former CompUSA employee, I have to agree. Towards the end, just before the liquidation, the emphasis on TAP (their extended warranty program) reached almost hysterical levels. I suspect it was due to the fact that it was the highest margin thing we sold in the store (most people never even used the warranty they'd bought), but I wonder if the higher-ups, since they knew that we were going to be folding soon, wanted to soak up as much extra cash before they announced they were liquidating as possible. I do remember about 2-3 months before liquidation we were told to ship large amounts of store inventory (brand new shit, at least a dozen pallets worth from our store) down to some bizarre redistribution center in Mexico. We joked that it was some sort of Mexican drug trafficking scheme or something, but then when we got word that the liquidation was going down, it made sense, Carlos Slim was probably hiding it down there so it wouldn't get sucked up in the bankruptcy.

Of course, we employees heard after it hit the news. Not that we didn't suspect, given that Christmas was right around the corner and we'd gotten shit for Christmas freight compared to other years, but we didn't officially find out until, I shit you not, a bunch of security guards showed up to make sure us employees weren't going to start looting the place. We didn't even know why the hell they were even there for like an hour until finally the word filtered down from corporate and we found out we were all out of a job.

Honestly, though, after that it was a fucking blast. Nobody gave a shit about anything anymore, so everybody was chill in a way I'd never experienced in that place (after all the ranting about TAP and Sirius and XM and Tech Labor and all that shit they were constantly on our ass to push), and it was like a carnival for a couple months. Got a ton of shit pretty damn cheap, too, our liquidator representative was pretty fucking cool. Cleaning up fixtures netted all sorts of buried treasure, AOL disks, ancient computer parts, sales brochures for Windows 98...it was kinda fun for a computer enthusiast.

Anyway, c'est la vie. Best Buy was just hanging on anyway. The days of the big box electronics retailer are over. It's all Walmart and Amazon now. Don't know if that's a good thing or not...

When I worked for Sears ten years ago I refused to "push" extended warranties. I told the customer that for $25 extra they can warranty their refrigerator five years and get free replacement of food if there's a power outage or failure. Plus repair. 95% of the time they'd say "no" and I'd ask "Are you sure?" and then drop it.

Sears responded by pulling me off the floor (thus I earn no money except min. wage) and making me watch Warranty training videos, because my EW percentage was too low. Basically punishment.

I didn't stay at that store long. I thought it would be a fun parttime job for extra cash, but it made me feel dirty instead.

EWs truly are a waste of money. Appliances either suffer infant mortality (first few months) or end-of-life mortality (15-20 years). The infant mortality is covered by the manufacturer's 1 year deal, and EOL is just EOL. Extended warranty covers neither of these two cases.

You've got to be kidding. User reviews are one of the best things about online shopping (the others are price and selection; it's a lot easier to see all the things that meet your requirements using "advanced search" on Newegg than to stare at a bunch of boxes on a shelf). Yes, many of them are bad, but many are good; you have to read them with a discerning eye, and you can frequently pick out some real gems in the reviews (either positive or negative--warnings about serious problems with the product, or detailed and useful information about the product that the mfgr didn't bother to include, such as which hardware revisions are compatible with alternate firmware and other esoteric stuff like that). What's the alternative? Listening to some know-nothing moron salesperson at a retail store? How is that an improvement?

Why does that not surprise me? I went into a Best Buy a few months back (it was the same one where my oldest actually got a good deal on a laptop) and surprise surprise! All the guys that had been there and knew WTF they were talking about was replaced by fresh hires whose favorite word was "Uuuhhh". these corps are a classic example of "penny wise and pound foolish" as they'll fire the guys that actually can do the job because they won't work for minimum wage and replace them with glorified checkout girls that have ZERO knowledge and skill and will more likely fuck things up or just give out blatantly wrong information.

And finally let us not forget the other reason why Worst buy deserves to die, the Geek Squad or as my last boss called them "thieving monkeys" for all the stolen data and parts and broken gear. I can't count the number of times i was brought a PC where geek squad had "worked" on it first and had to tell the customer he/she had been robbed, that RAM sticks were missing (sometimes ripped out), that some expensive graphics card that was originally in the unit was replaced by some old POS they had stuck in the slot, or how their large HDD had suddenly become some 80Gb that was several years older than the PC. In every case the managers were all "pics or STFU" and a friend that worked there for a few weekends for extra Xmas cash quit in disgust because more than half the guys there had USB HDDs and would run batch files looking for MP3s and videos, if you wonder why Worst Buy catches pedos now you know, its batch files looking for *.jpg, *.avi, *.etc. in fact i met my current GF because she was having trouble with her PC after she took it in for a cleaning following a fire. this PC was an emachines clearly labeled as having 2Gb of RAM yet when i opened it I found a single 256Mb stick.

So it really doesn't surprise me they are going under, they fired all the good workers that could actually help you, put in a bunch of clueless salespeople that are under orders to pile on the extra BS like extended warranties and pushing gamer rigs onto LOL, and filling GS with sticky fingers or those that simply don't have a damned clue about even basic PC troubleshooting. Maybe if enough of these bad stores go under we'll get a few good stores, but considering the current "screw everything but the quarterly report!" attitude probably not.