Best Buy Doesn’t Want to Sell Me a 52-Inch HDTV for $9.99. Reasonable Enough.
By Harry McCracken | Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 10:05 am
Early this morning, Best Buy had a deal on its site that was not merely a best buy but a mindbendingly, impossibly cheap one: a well-reviewed, high-end 52-inch Samsung LCD HDTV for…under ten bucks. $9.99 to be exact. Here, I’ll show you:
The price was, of course, a typo–one reported on at deal sites and by my pal Danny Allen at Gizmodo, whereupon scads of people presumably pulled out their wallets and bought a TV (maybe several of ’em!). Including me: I had to pay 91 cents in tax and California’s $25 recycling fee, but shipping was free, so it still seemed like an attractive deal overall. My order went through, with friendly confirmation:
Now, I’m aware that BestBuy.com’s conditions of use says it can cancel your order if it messed up a price. I’m also not one who rubs my hands in glee and pounces to seize advantage of other folks’ mistakes–even those of large, prosperous corporations. (For one thing, it’s bad karma, unless you have no problem with the rest of the world messing with you when you screw up.) But these kinds of site snafus are pretty common–here’s a news story on $15 Dell monitors–and I was curious how Best Buy would handle it. If the order got as far as me getting a call to schedule delivery, I was going to cancel it.
It was not exactly stunning when the set was both $1699.99 and unavailable later this morning:
Or when I got a form letter from Best Buy:
I’m not ticked off that Best Buy canceled the order, but the bit about the product being “no longer available” seems pretty weasly. I suspect that the Best Buy warehouses are still stocked with this TV, and that the company will sell them to people willing to fork over $1700. (Although at the moment, the page for the set is just gone.) “We’re sorry, we messed up on the price, but the terms and conditions of our site allow us to cancel orders at inaccurate prices, and we’re hereby doing so–you didn’t really think the set was $10, did you?” woulda earned BB some serious credibility here. But maybe that’s just me.
Meanwhile, I wonder if Best Buy will face an outburst of anger by aggrieved shoppers denied their $10 HDTVs. And why Best Buy and other Web retailers don’t have safeguards in place to flag bizarrely large discounts off list prices so they never get listed in the first place.
UPDATE: I got a second form letter from Best Buy, which comes pretty close to what I hoped for in the first place: an admission of pricing error (albeit in “mistakes were made” passive tense) and an apology. Here it is:
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August 13th, 2009 at 5:26 pm[…] Best Buy Doesn’t Want to Sell Me a 52-Inch HDTV for $9.99. Reasonable Enough. Early this morning, Best Buy had a deal on its site that was not merely a best buy but a mindbendingly, impossibly […] […]
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StarCraft 2 Possibly For $5 Says:
July 4th, 2010 at 12:33 pm[…] best buy had a similar situation with a 52' Flat Screen TV that was being sold for $9.99 and they refused to honor the argument Now usually if it was a small occurrence and only a few people ordered during the error they might […]
August 12th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Interesting. Poorly handled, I think.
Although it’s possible they are sold outon paper. I imagine they sold through their inventory at $10.
August 12th, 2009 at 10:29 am
THEY WONT SELL ME MINE EITHER BUT I AM MORE OF AN A** SO I AM COMPLAINING TO THE BBB, IF THAT IS THE PRICE POSTED THAT IS WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE TO SELL IT TO YOU AS. THERE MISTAKE IS NOT MY FAULT
August 12th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Definitely a missed opportunity – that email needs a re-write. Would have been nice though!
August 12th, 2009 at 11:38 am
The email just a form letter. There is no conspiracy.
>>> “But maybe that’s just me.”
Yes, it’s just you forgetting that BB has a bazillion customers. They aren’t going to customize an email just for wittle old you.
August 12th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I did a search on ITEM# LN52A650 and the item has been re-listed under another product number. It is now $1999.00 and it is NOT sold out. I called customer service and they said they were unable to comment on it, that we were to refer to our email.
This coupled with the PRICING OOPS on the Palm Pre’s 2 weeks ago, makes me think that BESTBUY is using fraudulent pricing to drive traffic to their site. Hey BESTBUY, terminate the few folks who’s job it is to double check pricing uploads etc, and use their yearly salary to honor a couple of the customer TV orders.. Do like 1% of the customers as a lottery, allowing those selected customers to buy (LIMITED to ONE) one TV at $9.99 and restore faith that you aren’t doing this as an intentional scam to drive customers to your site.
August 12th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Um, Red Panda? I know the e-mail was a form letter (I’m pretty smart for my age!) and didn’t expect a personal e-mail, just a form letter that addressed what actually happened. It seemed doable, and…it was! See my update–Best Buy followed up with exactly that.
–Harry
August 12th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Someone up there was thinking (or busy reading your blog 🙂
August 12th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
What would you have done if they’d exercised their right to substitute a Fischer-Price TV for $9.99?
August 12th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Sounds to me like the PR department read your blog and issued another email… 🙂
August 12th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Regardless of the price, I need to vouch for the quality of the Samsung flat screens. I have two, a 36 inch model and a 52 inch which is the next model up. Have not had a problem and very happy.
August 12th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Got to love all the etitled idiots who feel once again they should get something for nothing (or next to nothing)
How many of these morons would honor the price on say their used car if they accidently put it on Craigslist for $50 instead of $5000? None,thats who
Keep contacting BBBand screaming about Lawyers, this has been a lot of laughs.
August 13th, 2009 at 1:59 am
It could have been worse, I bought two routers from a company that had a similar error £13, instead of £130, for three months, they told me it was delayed, and then when they finally cancelled it took another three months for them to refund my money.
August 13th, 2009 at 6:29 am
I can’t people actually believe that they deserve the TV despite it being an obvious mistake. Get a job deadbeats! :p
August 13th, 2009 at 7:44 am
I program rates for a major insurance company. We are entering and checking thousands of spreadsheet values in any one change. We have repetative checks to capture typos, but they do happen.
And trust me, the person who posted that $9.99 price was spoken to. Not fired, but definately spoken to