Retailer Best Buy took Black Friday orders that it could not fulfill, waiting until days before Christmas to cancel them [NYT]

  • nosehat

    If this happens to you, I’d advocate simply shipping it back to them and demanding a full refund.  Tell them you had to buy a replacement present at the last minute when the one you ordered from them didn’t come.

    • http://www.mrericsir.com MrEricSir

      How are you going to ship back an order that the store canceled?

  • s2redux

    And what’s up with these Best Buy TV spots that are, effectively, attack ads against Santa? I have occasionally shopped Best Buy in emergency situations, but no more. (And, yes—I am thinking of the children.)

    • Chuck

      Maybe this calls for some parody ads.  The commercial will begin with a Best Buy customer screaming at some customer service rep.  As they pace back and forth all over the room — phone to ear — they’ll turn around and, by some miracle, find the products they ordered under the tree.  The irate Best Buy customer will look up, and find Santa next to the tree with a smug and triumphant look on his face.  All he’ll say is “Ho … ho … ho … bitch.”

  • Antinous / Moderator

    The same Best Buy that advertised cheap prices online, then used an in-store intranet to ‘prove’ to customers that they were mistaken about the advertised prices?

  • http://boingboing.net/ The Life Of Bryan

    It seems terribly cliché to ridicule the idea that people still buy shit from BestBuy.

    But, seriously, they do?

  • yeahyeahwhtever

    Hard to believe that people still shop at BB.  Aside from their corporate Attitude toward customers (which is offensive enough), their prices are too just high.

  • That_Anonymous_Coward

    They took these orders on Black Friday and were unable to manage their inventory to stop this sort of thing from happening.  Can you say failure… I knew you could.
    They wanted until a few days before Christmas to inform shoppers they were getting nothing.  Can you say evil… I knew you could.

    This of course has nothing to do with the beating the BB stock took on the market after Black Friday, because they were discounting so far and hurt their profits.
    I wonder if any of these cancelled orders represented funds being held for a while that might not be returned in time to get replacement gifts.