11:05 news - Circuit City to liquidate its 500+ stores

One word Amazon

No sales tax, no waiting in line, free shipping with purchases over a certain amount. Gotta love Amazon.

As for Best Buy, I've always had good experiences with them in the past. If you want horrible service try Fry's Electronics in Phoenix Arizona. Man I hated that place, everything was out of stock. It took over 30 minutes to order some Ram and forget about asking any type of question. They never know what the hell you are talking about. However the one in Aneheim, California was the exact opposite. They had great inventory and enough staff that was fast and knew what they were doing. Still was a little bit of a hassle trying to park and finding what I wanted. Not that bad though.

So between Best Buy and Fry's, I think I'll stick with Amazon.com

I now have to pay sales tax to Amazon ... but generally avoid shipping.

On online purchases:

The ironic thing with the laptop is my job had a discount with Dell's being a reseller. I paid the extra to get an HP at BB because I wanted to have a store I could yell at in case there were any problems. Dell had long since shipped their Dude, you're getting a Dell quality service overseas even by that time.

Lucky Day said:

Caveat Emptor is the rule of thumb here. In practice, low revenue items don't usually have an issue but high cost low profit items will get you stonewalled at any store (except maybe at Nordstroms) because it will cost the store and managers a percentage and bonuses.

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Is Caveat Emptor still common practice in the US? In Germany we have culpa in contrahendo, which resulted in a 6 months (effectively; the law is 24 months) minimum warranty with the burden of proof on the seller. (After that it reverts for the other 18 months.)

There are some laws for consumer protection, but overall any sort of warranty is going to be at the whim of the seller. Most sellers play nice, but it's choosing not to antagonize customers rather than following some law. So, by and large, Caveat Emptor.

I've had both good an bad experiences with Best Buy:


Good: I bought BGII shortly after it came out. I didn't install it right away though as I was finishing grad school. Shortly afterward, I go to install it and find that the second disk had what looked like paint on the backside of the disk. Not alot, but enough that the game failed during install. I could have sent it back to Interplay and got a new one in the mail, but I went back to Best Buy. I didn't have the receipt though. Manager looked at the disk, nodded, and then exchanged it (just the disks and jewel case) from a new one, no more questions asked.

Bad: In '97, I bought Wing Commander III as I finally had a PC that could play it. I bought the Gold Box Classics edition as it claimed it would run IN Win95. No dice. It actually required a dosboot disk to run. I looked up online, found that the new version actually did run IN Win95. Took mine back to Best Buy. Wanted to exchange it for the new version, which cost $10 more which I was happy to pay. Manager wouldn't budge. NO RETURNS ON OPENED SOFTWARE, EXCHANGE ONLY. I explained it's the same game, just a different version, told him I felt duped by the box ad that said it was Win95. No dice, wouldn't listen to me. If Circuit City hadn't already screwed me far worse, Best Buy would have been on the bad list from '97 onward.

blatantninja said:

If Circuit City hadn't already screwed me far worse, Best Buy would have been on the bad list from '97 onward.

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Kind of surprised to hear that, I've never had a negative experience at any Circuit City in all the years I've shopped there.

In fact, the local CC even gave me credit for an unopened game that was originally purchased at Best Buy. BB would never do that.

JDR13 said:

In fact, the local CC even gave me credit for an unopened game that was originally purchased at Best Buy. BB would never do that.

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It's funny, we had customers visiting today and over lunch we were discussing the Circuit City closure, and there was general feeling of dislike for BB.