Hey Best Buy: How about NO!

In the last month, I’ve helped two of my wife’s friends purchase laptops.  In both cases, they went to their local Best Buy, one in New Jersey and the other in Pennsylvania.  Each store was clean, well stocked, and had reasonably priced merchandise.  Similarly, in each instance, the friend bought a lower end laptop—something in the $500-700 range.  It was after the selection was made and before money changed hands, that the problem began.

I understand a stores desire to upsell and the need to offer service and accessories to people, I really do.  What we were bombarded with in both cases was an “optimizing and set up” service.  The first time, the salesperson was very vague, offering only generalities of “better performance” and “protection”.  The second was much more specific.  Below is a list of some of these services.  My comments are in red.

We’ll install top quality anti-virus, because what they put on them at the factory is worthless.  It came with a trial of Norton and they were offering Kaspersky.  Both are OK, but pricey.  I simply removed Norton and installed the solid, dependable, Avast.

The laptops are full of crap from the factory that needs to be removed before they’re usable.  Like what?  Both came with surprisingly few trial programs, no popups, no AOL pitches.  I wonder how the manufactures would like to hear their vendors describe the products like that?

We’ll test that WiFi is working.  The purchaser can do that too, by turning on the laptop at home.  If it doesn’t, bring it back.  Are you planning on testing every other function before it leaves the store?  Are the network cards in your laptops particularly unreliable? 

We need to remove all that stuff that Best Buy puts on there, because it will nag you and slow down your computer.  Let me get this straight, you want to charge me to remove detrimental software that you put on there in the first place???  If I bought a new car, would you expect me to pay the dealer to remove cement blocks they put in the trunk?  

Needless to say, after some firm discussion, we did not buy the optimization plan for $100.  In each case, it took me under an hour, including time to explain what I was doing, to remove a few things, install a few things, and run defrag.  

As I said, I’m good with stores trying to sell a service, but when they cross into the realm of fantasy and when they try to frighten non-tech savvy buyers, that’s not cool.  Are you listening, Best Buy?