Only 30 miles? I live 30 miles away from Idaho Falls where alot of shopping centers are. I think that's nothing.
Wow, another Idaho person?? I have worked in that store, and still do as a seasonal employee just for fun, and for the Intel Retail Edge ...
Not all Best Buys are created equal. I've been to too many best buys where you can't get any help at all, and this is the most frustrating for customers that go in, whether they are knowledgeable or not.
The knowledge still helps though, for customers that DO have some tech savvy. I have personally gone into three best buy stores recently, and in each one I went to their cellphone department and asked if they had an MHL cable.
Every single employee I asked didn't even know what MHL was. Granted, it's not really out yet on any TVs that I personally have seen, but there are several HTC and Samsung phones that support it now, and they are not obscure no name phones, they are big name and very popular phones like the Galaxy and Galaxy Nexus series. They should know about the major capabilities of the devices they sell.
Now back to my point. Sorry about the sidetrack. There are some stores that still have good people working in them, but there are a lot of stores that don't, and Geek Squad is so limited now in the services they can perform. A customer came in with a desktop that was overheating and shutting off like crazy, even with the slightest demand on the CPU. I installed some temp monitoring software (which I technically wasn't supposed to do) and verified that the CPU was indeed overheating like crazy, and upon closer inspection, it looked like the thermal paste was cracked and slowly being rattled out from in between the heatsink apparatus and the CPU itself. We stock some silver paste, so I went to the manager and asked if I could re-mount the HSF apparatus with some new thermal paste, and that it would likely solve the problem, charging a reasonable labor fee and making some good money for the store of course.
They turned me down. It was against company policy. I have put together so many custom computers in my time, and repaired so many for friends, family, and friends/family's business computers that there would have been no risk to the customer's PC. I've been doing this stuff for YEARS! It was already WELL out of warranty. Instead I had to tell the customer to pretty much go to hell, and that best buy REFUSES to help her.
I got in trouble once for rewiring a customer's fan to be 5v instead of 12v so the noise level of the unit would be tolerable within the room the customer needed it in. It was a violation of company policy.
When I first started working at best buy almost seven years ago, we could do a lot more, and make things work for people a lot better. It was easier to make package deals, we could affect our local store's SOP a lot more. We ran our store how we wanted to, and thus it fit our location and we could do what we needed to take care of our customers and attract them into the store. We went the extra mile for people, too, and took care of issues for people in the best way possible for the benefit of the customer. And did our store lose money? Nope. We got awards, and made lots of margin and revenue, and customers kept coming back because we took good care of them. I price matched newegg on video cards, power supplies, and other things, even if sometimes it was a different brand. If my store still made money on it, and the customer was happy and shopped here instead of newegg, WHY THE HELL NOT?
Get a job at Best Buy and try and match newegg now. Stores aren't allowed to do smart and local-focused business anymore. Corporate controls more and pushes more onto stores than they ever have in the history of this company. Best Buy definitely had its most profitable and successful runs when it granted the most autonomy and liberty to its local stores. I was a supervisor for two different departments and I had access to the numbers with my own eyes, and not just my local stores, but the whole country's numbers. Best Buy is a completely different beast now.
Despite some idiots and jerks that work at stores here and there, and some just plain annoying kids that work there as well, none of those things are the real problem.
It's the cancer within.