CrunchGear

Television salesman -tricking- customers into buying TVs?!?!? Say it ain’t so!

would never want to adjust a tv in a selling situation…like turn on the power?

As someone who has direct knowledge of how this business is run, all I can tell you is that stores and their departments are a direct reflection of their store manager and the supervisors who run these departments. There are always going to be exceptions, of course, but for the most part employees don’t have time to adjust every set, everyday. A lot of these newer sets have factory default resets which are used from time to time if some over excited customer gets something too far out of adjustment. But, to a great extent, other than setting the TVs to the individual store’s signal and display channel, these things are shown just as they come out of the box.

Now, we have had times where individual manufacturer representatives will come in and tinker with their product to get it to display what they feel is the best for their set, but the way customers are allowed to shop, they don’t stay adjusted for very long!

As far as employees attempting to “trick” customers; well, I suppose anything is possible. It seems kind of dangerous though, because that can cause returns, which degrades profits and margin for the store.

Not only that, but if you have a customer who feels they have been deceived, not only have you lost that customer’s future potential sales, but also their family and friends, or anyone else who may come in contact with them on a personal or professional level. I know at my store we go to great pains to get to know our customers before we offer them a choice of products.

Yes, we may be guilty of “over-presenting” on PSPs or PRPs…and you may find us talking to you about something else is the store that, on the surface, my seem totally unrelated to what the customer is shopping for.

On the other hand, how upset would you be if you had a problem with your expensive piece of electronic gear and are looking for a replacement, and found out that if you had paid just XX.XX more when you purchased it the first time, you’d just be talking home a new one at little or no extra cost?

Many of our customers expect us to offer this kind of service warranty, and have come to either expect it or even request it themselves! If manufacturer warranties were better - or even just longer - many customers would stop buying PSPs. The funny thing is, we HAVE a product in our stores that is warranted by a manufacturer so well that we don’t even offer a PSP on it! Funnier still, is that this is a great product, but NOW some customers have become skeptical of the product because we DON’T offer a coverage on it!

To answer the original question; I just turn on the TVs and let them play…dusting and cleaning them every once in a while…and let the customers do the adjusting themselves.

Hey BestBuyTVGuy, mind shooting me an email? I have some questions for something: seth (at) crunchgear.com

Thanks

Seth

Feel free to ask away…