Consumerist protects buyer rights

By Cory Anotado
Collegian Staff
February 6, 2008

Jason was a loyal Best Buy consumer, visiting his local store every Tuesday after work for the past four years. One day, while looking for a present for his father, he saw a sign that read, “2 for $25, choose from 3:10 to Yuma, Good Luck Chuck, Saw IV and War.” Each movie is $19.99, so two for $25 is a pretty good deal. He checked the fine print, which read: “Must be purchased on same receipt, no rain checks.”

Jason decided to buy two copies of 3:10 to Yuma, one for himself and one for his father. At the register, the movies rang up to $43 and change, obviously both of them rang up for their full $19.99. The cashier noted that in their weekly circular, a promotion states that the movie Saw IV needed to be purchased to get the discount. Jason showed the sign to the cashier, who continued to disagree with the sign, saying that Saw IV still needed to be purchased. Jason escalated the situation to a manager and the manager repeated the sentiment.

“This headset guy actually tells me at this point that the managers are too busy to talk to me about it. Well, now I am getting a little irritated. Since when, at any retail establishment, is a store manager too busy to handle a customer problem?” writes Jason.

He called Best Buy’s corporate line, and surprisingly, Best Buy told him the same thing, but offered him a $25 gift card to apologize for the mix-up. Jason agreed to the gift card and hung up the phone. He then does two things: “I begrudgingly go and buy one copy of the movie for $19.99 and leave the store because I needed the birthday present regardless of the outcome.” Then he wrote up the whole ordeal and sent it to Ben Popken, the editor-in-chief of the Consumerist, an online blog dedicated to consumer rights.

The best way to think of the Consumerist is to imagine Consumer Reports and add a load of brass and a bit of irreverence toward normal consumer reporting. The Consumerist covers bad customer service, like Jason’s story above, gives helpful tips to help consumers save money, provides contact numbers and addresses for CEOs and other executive customer service lines and on occasion, stories of above-and-beyond measures of customer service.

Now, more than ever, consumers have to be vigilant to keep their hard-earned dollars and cents. We’ve all read horror stories about lead paint, recalled food, mysteriously rotten meats and identity theft, and no one wants any of those consumer terrors to befall them. However, with thousands of companies and only one you, keeping tabs on everyone and everything is daunting. With online blogs like the Consumerist and the community of thousands of Consumerist readers and commenters who can not only commiserate with the idea of keeping your money in check, but can also give helpful advice, you can take a bit of comfort knowing that someone’s looking out for you.

Jason took comfort in that, but he also got results. After his story hit the front page of the Consumerist, it had more than 137,000 page views and almost 5,000 links from the social networking site Digg.com. Not long after, the District Manager for the Southeast U.S. Best Buy stores gave Jason a call, apologized for the fiasco and offered him a $200 gift card and a copy of Saw IV as a goodwill gesture.

The power of the Internet is pretty daunting, isn’t it?

anotadoc1@lasalle.edu