We did, we are. We kept being offered tantalizing hope that they would resolve it. At least up until the last 36 hours when they started stonewalling.
We also don't have an easy way to pick up a fridge (it won't fit in our car) and delivery dates at other companies are just as far out.
So, having cancelled we're now just kind of SOL.
We may end up getting bailed out by a friend with a trailer, we'll see.
But I'm honestly as concerned about the fact that their support reps seemed legitimately scared when they couldn't help us and it was clear we were unsatisfied with what they could offer us as I am about our lack of a fridge.
Support people shouldn't be scared like that. It's not on them. It's on the company.
Have you considered getting a mini fridge, or even a couple of mini fridges? It’s not ideal of course, but at least you’ll have a fridge and you won’t need to worry about it for a while if you don’t want to.
Ask around for quotes on delivering a fridge comparable to the one bb was supposed to deliver, within the same timeframe. Keep documentation, which can include just your notes on who you called and when. Presumably you won't get many quotes, that's fine. Do it until you get one, and execute it.
Later, but not too much later, sue BB in small claims for the difference between the price they charged and what you ended up paying. It doesn't hurt to ask for some compensation for your time, though you're less likely to get that. The point is, you are most likely entitled to be made whole for any increased expense you incurred to get a fridge on your required timeframe, as a result of BB's breach of contract (yes, you had a contract with them - you have a contract every single time you purchase something, whether it's written or no).
It's good you wrote this up to bring attention to this, but did you really have to torment the CSR by saying you'd go to social media about it as some kind of bargaining chip? You're right it's not on them, it's on the company. But that CSR is probably going to be thinking about this for the rest of the week, fearing that he'll be out of a job soon for something out of his control and be unable to pay the bills and stuff.
EDIT: I'd be terrified too if some big shot on the phone starts threatening a social media campaign against me, some unfortunate soul forced to work in a call center to deal with people like this
I was hoping he could use it as a bargaining chip with his supervisor and tried to make clear we'd leave him out of it.
This was only after we were getting stonewalled and he was saying he wasn't allowed to escalate us.
Edit: To be clear, he was scared about us asking to escalate well before we mentioned anything about social media. That was a last ditch attempt to break through. The fear preceded any mention of social media.
I was really hoping, they could use it to break both of us out of the trap. It didn't work. It's possible they didn't understand that's what I was trying to do. They were already pretty agitated and I was pretty frustrated. But I tried to make it clear I wasn't aiming it at them.
And each time their seeming fear and agitation preceded it by quite a bit. It was linked to us being unsatisfied with what they could offer us and asking to be escalated. And their inability to escalate at all.
They're left with the inability to solve the problems they're faced with, and no one of higher authority to pass those problems on to.
is it the customer or the company that we should hold responsible for the customer having no avenue for support after a loss of a multiple thousand dollar item?
CSR was probably terrified because 'metrics' are the god-king of call centers.
Going over on Call Times, having too many escalations, hell I worked at a place where the CSRs would get written up for taking a bathroom break too long.
Frankly, the environment of some Call Centers easily trade blows with Amazon Warehouses for worker conditions; main difference is instead of the rigors of physical labor you get to be sedentary instead.
I quit reading when you tried to elevate your own importance by stating that your wife is 9 months pregnant. So fucking what? So Best Buy needs to rearrange it's whole priority list because you procrastinated? GTFO.
That's just the reality of our situation. We didn't procrastinate, we ordered it with plenty of time to spare. Our original delivery date was well ahead of our due date. They missed it, and our due date got moved up due to being high risk. Maybe I overshared, but parts of our story - the fact that the new dates they offered us don't work for us - don't make sense with out that piece of information.
Obviously not with "plenty of time to spare" or the rescheduling would be a non-story, even a month from now. The whole point is that when delivery did not go exactly right, it became a crisis, specifically because you don't have "time to spare".
Have you ever been through a high risk pregnancy? Especially one that comes after losses?
There's a lot to deal with, a lot you are juggling, and a lot on your mind. And in our case, the mold on our old fridge only showed up again once it got warm enough and wet enough - it showed up last summer but there was a chance we'd killed it. Once it showed up, we realized we needed to replace it and it took us a few weeks to get that sorted on top of everything else we needed to do. Even just having to replace our old fridge at all was pushing the edges of our bandwidth.
We ordered it with two months to spare - our due date was late July. The delivery date was a full month ahead of our due date. They missed the window, our delivery date got moved up, and here we are.
Also, if you'd read on, you'd have found that for the first two days, they seemed to be trying to work with us and we were perfectly happy with that.
I wrote this up because a) they failed to follow through on their end at every turn and then started stonewalling us and b) their front line support seemed just as trapped in their system as we were, and downright terrified when they are left unable to help a customer (which the reps we were interacting with quickly were).
I’m not really following the part with the mold - can you not pull the fridge out and give it a deep cleaning, or worst case hire someone who specializes in that to do so?
We did that last year. Pulled it out from the wall, twice. Sprayed it down completely with bleach. Let the bleach sit. Sprayed it down again.
We had to spray down the walls as well, because each time it had already grown to the walls.
After the second time, I thought we might have killed it, because it didn't come back. But I think that was just the weather changing.
It showed up again a month or two ago.
Each time I pulled it out to clean it, I got a headache from the bleach. I don't think I'm going to have to bandwidth to deal with all that when we're sleep deprived with a newborn. And we also don't want to risk further mold spread to the rest of the house.
I suspect that it's hiding out in areas of the fridge that I can't reach in the back. There's insulation, and the internals around the coils that are really hard to reach.
It's a really old fridge too. I don't actually know how old because I inherited it with my previous house, which I moved into in 2012. It was already old then, so it's at least a decade old and then some. Our old house was super moldy. So it's not surprising it infected the fridge.
Edit: I suppose we could try hiring someone. But I honestly think it's partly just that infected, and partly that the insulation has worn down over time, so that it stays cold enough on the outside to collect condensation and create a perfect mold environment in the summer. We try to minimize our use of AC and use fans and windows instead, so our house is a pretty humid and warm environment in the summer.
Best Buy is a dying company. They laid off 5,000 people in February, stopped taking calls in the stores (rerouting to call centers) and the CEO said their aim is to close 3-4 stores a year. Those do not sound like the metrics of a healthy company. I guess maybe they are trying to position themselves as an online electronics retailer, but that just steals the magic of Best Buy. The magic being I can see and preview a product before buying. I refuse to purchase a high dollar electronic device product without the chance to lay eyes on it. I made that mistake ordering a TV from Amazon.
That is hilarious, because BBY IT is basically two different IT departments (brick/mortar and dotcom) and they HATE EACH OTHER.
At the C-level, the brick/mortar IT group was more influential/ingrained/in-power, despite their absolutely idiotic outmoded IT management policies.
Since I've left, they still are doing financially ok, but it just seems like a company where suddenly the floor will fall out. Their stores just sell floor space to vendors who staff it with their own people IIRC.
That said, they're the last electronics retailer you can drive to, and we need _some_ competition to Amazon.
I had a similar experience back in February when they shipped an RTX 3090 using a carrier called LSO. you ever heard of LSO? me neither. anyway. after spending a week with LSO for them to figure out my package was lost, Best Buy told me they'd ship me another. fast forward through another month of lies from best buy. every single one of them sounded scared of losing their job if they escalated. several hung up on me. one best buy "supervisor" told me that I could trust him because he sent his troops to die in Iraq...like...wtf?!
to close up, it took 7 weeks from LSO saying they lost the package to getting my refund from best buy. fuck best buy.
I worked at Best Buy for a while. They would literally threaten our jobs over anything. Your hours were based on how many people you signed up for their warranty/Geek Squad bullshit. They expected you to push it on people (especially old people/non-tech people). I was also expected to sell their credit cards. On Black Friday, I was forced to work 18 hours. They literally made me feel like working there was as serious as doing brain surgery.
It is a shitty retail job.
It was a horrible environment.
Delivery companies are the scam of the century. If you're ordering something over 50lbs, just EXPECT it to fall into the bermuda triangle, and YOU WILL have to call both the seller and the delivery company and wait on hold for hours to get them to deliver it. Sometimes you'll have to call a few days in a row, because the delivery company handed it off to another "door delivery" company which is 2 guys and a uhaul and they're on a bender. The "delivery window" is at their convenience. You don't think the company will go out of their way to deliver it do you? If they aren't coincidentally delivering 800 tonnes of ping pong balls to Boeing next door, they won't deliver to you on that day. Sorry.
Companies have problems occasionally, it sucks for sure, but trying to place all the blame on Best Buy for you not being able to take delivery because you are in a hospital is nonsense.
The author has his entitlement bar set to the max and needs to come back down to earth.
Can we change the title to something like:
Random guy and Best Buy both contribute to delays of a shipment.
or
How the Amazon instant delivery model is causing people to set unrealistic expectations.
31 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] threadCancel the order, go the store, get a new fridge. It's honestly not that difficult.
We also don't have an easy way to pick up a fridge (it won't fit in our car) and delivery dates at other companies are just as far out.
So, having cancelled we're now just kind of SOL.
We may end up getting bailed out by a friend with a trailer, we'll see.
But I'm honestly as concerned about the fact that their support reps seemed legitimately scared when they couldn't help us and it was clear we were unsatisfied with what they could offer us as I am about our lack of a fridge.
Support people shouldn't be scared like that. It's not on them. It's on the company.
Later, but not too much later, sue BB in small claims for the difference between the price they charged and what you ended up paying. It doesn't hurt to ask for some compensation for your time, though you're less likely to get that. The point is, you are most likely entitled to be made whole for any increased expense you incurred to get a fridge on your required timeframe, as a result of BB's breach of contract (yes, you had a contract with them - you have a contract every single time you purchase something, whether it's written or no).
EDIT: I'd be terrified too if some big shot on the phone starts threatening a social media campaign against me, some unfortunate soul forced to work in a call center to deal with people like this
This was only after we were getting stonewalled and he was saying he wasn't allowed to escalate us.
Edit: To be clear, he was scared about us asking to escalate well before we mentioned anything about social media. That was a last ditch attempt to break through. The fear preceded any mention of social media.
I was really hoping, they could use it to break both of us out of the trap. It didn't work. It's possible they didn't understand that's what I was trying to do. They were already pretty agitated and I was pretty frustrated. But I tried to make it clear I wasn't aiming it at them.
And each time their seeming fear and agitation preceded it by quite a bit. It was linked to us being unsatisfied with what they could offer us and asking to be escalated. And their inability to escalate at all.
They're left with the inability to solve the problems they're faced with, and no one of higher authority to pass those problems on to.
what alternative would you have recommended?
Going over on Call Times, having too many escalations, hell I worked at a place where the CSRs would get written up for taking a bathroom break too long.
Frankly, the environment of some Call Centers easily trade blows with Amazon Warehouses for worker conditions; main difference is instead of the rigors of physical labor you get to be sedentary instead.
There's a lot to deal with, a lot you are juggling, and a lot on your mind. And in our case, the mold on our old fridge only showed up again once it got warm enough and wet enough - it showed up last summer but there was a chance we'd killed it. Once it showed up, we realized we needed to replace it and it took us a few weeks to get that sorted on top of everything else we needed to do. Even just having to replace our old fridge at all was pushing the edges of our bandwidth.
We ordered it with two months to spare - our due date was late July. The delivery date was a full month ahead of our due date. They missed the window, our delivery date got moved up, and here we are.
Also, if you'd read on, you'd have found that for the first two days, they seemed to be trying to work with us and we were perfectly happy with that.
I wrote this up because a) they failed to follow through on their end at every turn and then started stonewalling us and b) their front line support seemed just as trapped in their system as we were, and downright terrified when they are left unable to help a customer (which the reps we were interacting with quickly were).
yea, mold tends to do that. not exactly a surprise.
We had to spray down the walls as well, because each time it had already grown to the walls.
After the second time, I thought we might have killed it, because it didn't come back. But I think that was just the weather changing.
It showed up again a month or two ago.
Each time I pulled it out to clean it, I got a headache from the bleach. I don't think I'm going to have to bandwidth to deal with all that when we're sleep deprived with a newborn. And we also don't want to risk further mold spread to the rest of the house.
I suspect that it's hiding out in areas of the fridge that I can't reach in the back. There's insulation, and the internals around the coils that are really hard to reach.
It's a really old fridge too. I don't actually know how old because I inherited it with my previous house, which I moved into in 2012. It was already old then, so it's at least a decade old and then some. Our old house was super moldy. So it's not surprising it infected the fridge.
Edit: I suppose we could try hiring someone. But I honestly think it's partly just that infected, and partly that the insulation has worn down over time, so that it stays cold enough on the outside to collect condensation and create a perfect mold environment in the summer. We try to minimize our use of AC and use fans and windows instead, so our house is a pretty humid and warm environment in the summer.
At the C-level, the brick/mortar IT group was more influential/ingrained/in-power, despite their absolutely idiotic outmoded IT management policies.
Since I've left, they still are doing financially ok, but it just seems like a company where suddenly the floor will fall out. Their stores just sell floor space to vendors who staff it with their own people IIRC.
That said, they're the last electronics retailer you can drive to, and we need _some_ competition to Amazon.
It is a shitty retail job. It was a horrible environment.
Unrelated, but Carvana too. Logistics everywhere seems to be cracking
Honestly, if you need it, take matters into your hands. I'm jaded at four sequential problematic deliveries in a month
Companies have problems occasionally, it sucks for sure, but trying to place all the blame on Best Buy for you not being able to take delivery because you are in a hospital is nonsense.
The author has his entitlement bar set to the max and needs to come back down to earth.
Can we change the title to something like:
Random guy and Best Buy both contribute to delays of a shipment.
or
How the Amazon instant delivery model is causing people to set unrealistic expectations.