Showing posts with label Best Buy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best Buy. Show all posts

Dec 29, 2010

Shopping by Phone

Best Buy now targets personalized advertisements to shoppers when a program detects that they are in other stores, such as Wal-Mart.

If shoppers use TheFind's free app to compare prices on TVs at Wal-Mart, for example, the phone gets data from recent searches and shows them ads of similar electronics for sale at Best Buy. The items may not be identical or cheaper, but Best Buy gets in the competition. Best Buy, famous for their restocking fees and high pressure 'extended warranties',  recently settled a lawsuit from the Connecticut attorney general alleging that it showed web prices on in-store kiosks that were higher than customers saw on their home computers. It also recently dumped its restocking fees for many items.

The offers are only sent to customers who opt to allow the program to use their phone's global positioning system to track their location.

The ads are similar to the special offers based on what we are searching for while on home computers. There are many apps to help compare prices, including one from Amazon. Obviously, apps that use your location against you are never a good idea, and maybe Best Buy isn't.

Apr 27, 2010

Theft at Best Buy

The remarkable heist of a Best Buy store in New Jersey almost seemed to be from the Mission Impossible movie, as thieves made off with $26,000 worth of Apple notebooks without leaving a trace in the store.

Best Buy employees discovered a hole in the roof, while not a single motion sensor was set off, and no evidence captured on the security cameras.  The thieves employed a “high degree of sophistication. They never touched the floor. They rappelled in and rappelled out” according to a police department spokesman.

They scaled a gas pipe located on the side of the building onto the roof, where they cut a 3-ft wide hole, used some kind of suction to lift the piece out, lowered themselves 16 feet into the store (10 feet off the ground, so motion sensors would not go off).  Everything was planned so store banners would obscure the security cameras. They absconded with the laptops off metal racks, while hanging from the ceiling, Tom Cruise style.