2008 Woodie Awards
Best Buy understaffs and underestimates
Travis Weldon
Issue date: 9/27/07 Section: Opinions
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What happened to the good days of customer service?
It seems like a pretty simple concept to me. If you want customers to keep coming back to your store, maybe helping them out would be a logical step to make sure they stay a customer.
The other day, my roommate and I went to Best Buy to pick up a game we heard was on sale. We were both hungry, but assumed this trip wouldn't take more than five minutes before I could stuff myself with the bliss of a grande soft taco.
Indeed, it only took us a few to pick up the game and move to the register.
That's where the trouble started. They had two registers open on a Saturday afternoon.
Now, at first I thought this was a little weird that only two lines would be going to check people out of the store on a Saturday afternoon. I don't know if Best Buy got the memo, or maybe it didn't have a cover sheet on it, but I look at Saturday as being a fairly profitable day of business. Maybe Best Buy doesn't see it that way.
Not only that, but also a person trying to buy an Xbox 360 was having trouble of some sort, so that line was going nowhere.
One by one, people in that line were moving over to the line I was standing in.
That line was already six deep by the time my roommate and I stepped into it, but now there were at least six more customers behind me and only one register available.
When you add up the time it takes for credit cards slips to go through the system, people signing the pad, the people at the register trying to get you to buy a subscription to a magazine that would be better off used as toilet paper, it turned into a 25-minute trip to Best Buy.
And the whole time, I just kept thinking about how delicious my grande soft taco would taste.
But there is a larger issue at stake than my uncontrollable addiction to Taco Bell.
I do not blame the lady at my register for doing what she is supposed to do. I do not blame the lady at the other register because she was probably going through a standard procedure. Who should I blame?
It seems like a pretty simple concept to me. If you want customers to keep coming back to your store, maybe helping them out would be a logical step to make sure they stay a customer.
The other day, my roommate and I went to Best Buy to pick up a game we heard was on sale. We were both hungry, but assumed this trip wouldn't take more than five minutes before I could stuff myself with the bliss of a grande soft taco.
Indeed, it only took us a few to pick up the game and move to the register.
That's where the trouble started. They had two registers open on a Saturday afternoon.
Now, at first I thought this was a little weird that only two lines would be going to check people out of the store on a Saturday afternoon. I don't know if Best Buy got the memo, or maybe it didn't have a cover sheet on it, but I look at Saturday as being a fairly profitable day of business. Maybe Best Buy doesn't see it that way.
Not only that, but also a person trying to buy an Xbox 360 was having trouble of some sort, so that line was going nowhere.
One by one, people in that line were moving over to the line I was standing in.
That line was already six deep by the time my roommate and I stepped into it, but now there were at least six more customers behind me and only one register available.
When you add up the time it takes for credit cards slips to go through the system, people signing the pad, the people at the register trying to get you to buy a subscription to a magazine that would be better off used as toilet paper, it turned into a 25-minute trip to Best Buy.
And the whole time, I just kept thinking about how delicious my grande soft taco would taste.
But there is a larger issue at stake than my uncontrollable addiction to Taco Bell.
I do not blame the lady at my register for doing what she is supposed to do. I do not blame the lady at the other register because she was probably going through a standard procedure. Who should I blame?