Circuit City sends customers to Best Buy

Hahahaha good luck with best buy!

I have a few highly geeky friends who know their techie devices, and I
haven't heard a good thing about Best Buy. I have heard however the
clerks will try to smooth talk around you and have been caught from my
friends blantantly lying about their policies in order to make a
sale.

They also apparently try to categorize the customer from several
categories Best Buy has offered, based on how much they know about
technology, if they will be a repeat customer etc. to try and help the
clerks identify if a customer will be a good sale or not.

Well if they did not use the term SOL why are you saying they did, to
make them look ba, because SOL can be an offensive term to use that
term to make them look bad is not right.

The return policy is 30 days. If the return was so important to you,
you should have made a special trip to do the return. It's not like
they pulled the 30 day policy out of nowhere.

Why should Circuit City fix YOUR mistake? Take some responsibility for
your actions.

I HIGHLY doubt you "didn't have an attitude with her." You cannot
honestly tell me you were calm and polite throughout the whole ordeal
based on the tone of your letter.

A couple things stand out to me here. First off, I do think it is
kind of silly that they were unable to do a return on an unopened
product with the receipt, which they are still selling. That is a
pretty silly policy, and it is too bad. But it is the policy
nonetheless. As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, Jamekeya
didn't do anything to merit a complaint, she simply followed a policy
she had no power to change, and relayed to you the fact that her
manager was out to lunch and could not be disturbed. My manager would
be pretty irked at me if I disrupted his lunch to ask him to break
policy, too! And I don't know what your opinion of the time the
manager went to lunch has to do with anything, it just makes you look
cranky to point it out as though you can't believe someone would go to
lunch at 1:45. I don't know where you work, but I go to lunch
whenever I get the chance, sometimes quite a bit later than that, and
I start my day at 9AM. That hour is very precious to me, when I can
get it, because it represents the one hour of my workday where I can
sit back, relax, and not worry about my customer's well-being and
happiness for a while.
So to finish up what is quickly becoming a long post, you might well
have a valid complaint here, but it is against the people that made
the policies, not the people trying to enforce them. Making it
personal doesn't further your cause.

When the management staff is no longer capable of wisdom, discretion,
and judgment, or not allowed to exercise such, then they are not
"managers". They are merely mindless pawns, different from the hourly
staff only by means of pay, not by intelligence. Circuit City has
slowly been dooming itself by not allowing intelligence, wisdom, and
foresight to come into play with it's business. Best Buy, Costco, and
many others would like to extend a big and hearty "Thank you!" to
Circuit City for sending so much business their way! Keep it up CC!

I feel the letter writer was asking too much here.

If this were a matter of being just slightly out of the 14 or 30 day
return period (keeping in mind that those periods were extended for
Christmas season shopping) - maybe this would be another matter.

However when a store has a policy of 14/30 on an item, at what point
do they bend the rules way out there months down the road? Return
requirements are made with consideration of being fair to both the
customer and the store.

Honestly, to take such a stance against a store because they didn't
bend the rules just for you is very childish.

This is an example of a "grey area" for retail management (at almost
every retail establishment there is ALWAYS some sort of member of
management on duty to make a decision). There's the 30 day or less
requirement that retailers feel that "if they let one person break the
rule then they have to let everyone else break the rule" as opposed to
applying the 30 day requirement based on the "spirit of the rule".
The "spirit of the rule" is too prevent various scams. The possible
scams are too numerous to mention here.

In your case however you have a receipt and an unopened package. That
says a lot in your favor. As a member of management that I once was I
was faced with your situation many times. I would invoke the 30 day
rule if seemed like there was any possiblity that a scam was underway
or the customer received some good use out of it (i.e. a customer
returning a so called defective item after a year --- hey it happens
at retail). In your situation neither is the case and I would have
done what you had asked Circuit City to do. It only makes good
business sense. The Best Buy you went to made a very smart business
decision. My "hat" is off to them.

I think it's great that Best Buy issued you a credit for an item
purchased at their competitor, Circuit City. However, Circuit City's
return/exchange policy is 30 days with receipt which means 30 days,
not 90. It is the consumer's responsiblity to make sure they
understand the exchange/return policies of all stores where they shop.