Tuesday, July 06, 2004 Attention Shoppers: Please Disregard Our Sale Items
Indeed, stores stuff your mailbox, your newspaper, and their store with fliers describing sale items they don't want you to buy. They'll sell the stuff to you, but if you buy it you're a dick and they'll do their damndest to get rid of your ass. Sounds like a marketing plan to me: spend piles of money trying to get customers, then immediately turn around and try to get rid of the same customers. Think I'm making this up? Read on:
Some retailers are deciding that the customer can be very, very wrong - as in unprofitable. And some, including Best Buy Co. Inc., are discriminating between profitable customers and shoppers they lose money on.
Like a customer who ties up a salesworker but never buys anything, or who buys only during big sales. Or one who files for a rebate, then returns the item.
Someone with no intention of purchasing anything, but who gets a salesperson to show and describe to them everything in the store nonetheless, is what we call an asshole.
Someone who buys something, gets the rebate, then returns the item without returning the rebate is arguably a criminal, and definitely an asshole.
And, as I have now learned, someone who buys stuff when it's on sale is no different from the two assholes I described above. I have also learned that a sale isn't intended to get people to buy something they otherwise might not, or to get people to buy stuff sooner than they would have in the absence of a sale, or to attract new customers to a store they might not have patronized previously. Nope, the purpose of having a sale is to see who comes in to buy whatever's on sale and brand those people assholes, then try to come up with ways to get them to stop buying stuff. Asshole-identification is so important to Best Buy that they print millions of flyers and buy hours of TV time in an effort to attract these assholes, whose money they do not want.
I have never bought anything at Best Buy, although I have visited various locations and witnessed many purchases. I might have, perhaps, eventually purchased something there at some point in the future. But now I know better. If I ever was to purchase something there, be assured that I would have made every effort to avoid being "helped" by the adolescent electronics experts employed at Best Buy. I would definitely not use a rebate as a way to make free money. This matters not. For since there's a good possibility that whatever I would have bought there in the future might have been on sale, I would be considered an unwanted asshole for walking in there and buying something. So it's certainly not like Best Buy is losing a good customer, or a customer at all, by pissing me off with their insistence on grouping sale-shoppers with assholes and thieving assholes. But if I ever found myself tempted to flip through a Best Buy flyer rather than immediately dispatch it to the trashcan, I will recall that it's really just a paper asshole-detector and immediately place it in its rightful spot above the dirty food wrappers and below the bags of terrier excrement.
12:37 PM
