Caught in the Middle

Earlier this week I ran across the story of a Best Buy store that had posted a sign by their front door stating up front that the price listed on their website may not be the same one offered in the store, and that if you want they will help you place the order online for delivery to your home. Needless to say, a lot of people (and bloggers) immediately started ragging on Best Buy for this remarkable bit of electronic ineptitude, saying that if you’re going to have one price for online purchases (and in-store pickups) you ought to be able to coordinate that price with the brick-and-mortar stores and have the same prices on the shelf tag. Which is true enough, I suppose, but rather misses the point behind a simple paper sign stuck to the front window – which is clearly local management’s effort to protect itself from being caught between corporate management and outraged customers…

You can pick up the story from The Consumerist if you want to; they should also have links to various news stories about this even by now, as well as a story of the offending sign. It’s worth noting that Best Buy is a regular target of consumer analysts and advocates nationwide, not just the nice folks on The Consumerist; it’s also worth pointing out that Best Buy has ended up on the wrong side of both civil and criminal actions for pricing fraud, and in one case was caught setting up an in-store intranet site that looked exactly like the company’s real web site, only with the higher prices as indicated on the shelves. But while all of these various crimes are real – and while Best Buy has consistently failed to behave in the manner we would expect from a national retail chain – the store in this particular story isn’t attempting to take advantage of anyone, much less defraud their customers. Local management has obviously gotten tired of explaining that the prices they are told to charge and the ones offered online won’t always be the same, and is acting to cut off people who will demand the lower price at check-out even though the store can’t offer it…

The unfortunate truth is that a company as large as Best Buy could easily have multiple departments in multiple locations (or even countries) setting prices for different stores in different regions, as well as the ones on the web site. It would be more professional (and rather more efficient) for the company to hire someone to coordinate all of those prices and make them at least somewhat consistent, but this isn’t a legal requirement; as long as the company complies with local laws about pricing policy (e.g. no “bait and switch” games, or the equivalent) they can charge whatever they want. You, as the consumer, don’t have to pay those prices, of course, but the people working at the various stores will still have to deal with all of the whining, carping, and complaining from the people who came in and didn’t find the price they wanted to pay – as well as all of the people who think they can get a special discount by claiming to have seen a much lower price on the web site and demanding that the store honor the price they just made up…

After a few weeks of that, it’s hardly surprising that local management got tired of having to explain things and just put a sign in the window. The lesson to take away here, I think, is that corporate management can do whatever it wants, but if they make things difficult for the people on the spot (in this case, the store’s management team) they can expect their local representatives to take matters into their own hands. If this sort of thing is going to be a problem for the company, then you need to pay more attention to what is going on in your local operations – before you find your company’s name being mocked by thousands of scruffy bloggers for their own amusement…