Saturday, August 11, 2007

Unsuccessfully buying a laptop at Best Buy

My wife needs a new laptop. We went to Best Buy. We found the laptop we wanted, with all the right stuff on it, at a price that we felt was reasonable. Just one minor issue. Like most laptops, this one idiotically had 1 Gig of RAM to run Vista Home Premium, so we needed to upgrade it to 2 Gig.

Me: "How much is a Gig of RAM for this laptop?"

Best Buy Employee: "About $120."

Me: "Sounds good. We'd like to get this laptop, but we want to upgrade from 1 Gig to 2 Gig."

BBE: "Okay, that'll be an extra $240."

(pause)

Me: "Uh, sorry... I just need 1 extra Gig of memory. That's $120."

BBE: "No, the laptop has 2 memory slots. Right now it has two 512MB memory cards in them, so you'll need to buy two 1 Gig memory cards to get to 2 Gig."

Me: "Riiiight... but I don't need the two 512s, which cost $120, so it's still only a $120 difference."

BBE: "No, you're buying the laptop as is, so the two 512s are your's, and to upgrade you need to buy the two 1 Gigs for $240."

Me: "And then I just throw away the two 512s?"

BBE: *shrugs*

Me: "You do understand that you've just lost this sale, right?"

BBE: *shrugs*

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

yeah, definitely the employees fault that it comes with 2 512's. Why didn't you just look at a 2 gig laptop to begin with? The employee doesn't work on commission, and if it were me and the customer was getting annoyed at me over circumstances outside of my control, then I would have had the same reaction, shrug and let you walk away. On to the next customer.