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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

So, he used that practice to his advantage--by instituting a price matching system.

More like he used a price-matching program to swindle people.

Suppose you want a 512GB microsd card. You've heard through their ads Best Buy will match Amazon's prices, so you depart your house with cash in hand, happy you won't have to wait for shipping. You walk into Best Buy, pick a Sandisk drive off the shelf, and show the cashier that despite Best Buy listing it at $150, Amazon only charges $100, so please match their price.

Sorry says the cashier, this Sandisk 512GB U-3 V30 A2 Class 10 microsd card is model SDSQXBZ-512G-ANCMA, while the Sandisk 512GB U-3 V30 A2 Class 10 card on Amazon is model number SDSQXA1-512G-GN6MA so we can't price match.

Price matching means absolutely nothing when every single one of Best Buy's overpriced products has its own special model number that prevents them from ever having to price match anything.

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For every instance of price matching I've done at BB, the attendants basically did a spot check of the title of the listing and never checked the model numbers.

Of course, sample size of 1 and it's quite possible that the employees at my local BB are just lazy to my advantage

A lot of times it pays to double check that the model numbers match and go in and forcefully demand the price match. Employees have zero incentive to match a price and it forces them to input more data just to complete the sale.

>Employees have zero incentive to match a price and it forces them to input more data just to complete the sale.

but they're being paid hourly, so it's not like it result is more work for them.

It's more work for them to lookup the amazon price and fill out whatever price change forms they're required to submit in order to get you the lower price. The alternative is just telling you it's not a match, swiping the barcode over the scanner and handing you a receipt.

They maybe evaluated by some sales metric rather than percentage of hours present during shift hours ;)

That's severely flawed logic to insinuate that hourly wage equates to work output. You must be on salary. Us little guys don't think like that, I promise. Underpaid workers don't want "more work" paid the same amount as if they do "less work," unless they're paid proper living wages in which case they wouldn't feel cutting corners necessary imo.

Employees have zero incentive to fight extra hard to save the company an extra $20. They're getting paid minimum wage regardless. Same way the cashiers at the grocery store will scan their bonus club card to get you a discount -- they don't get paid more or less if you get charged differently.

Same experience here. The most they do is scrutinize to see if Amazon.com is selling or a 3rd party.

Having worked at Best Buy in the last few years, this is the exception, not the rule. Employees were required to match the model number, and all price matches require manager overrides. Often times a manager would double-check to make sure the items were identical down to the letter.

A common example of this scam was phone cases. Each retailer is provided the same item with a model number differing by a single letter (A for Amazon, T for Target, B for Best Buy). Because of this deviation I was not allowed to offer price matches on any of these items.

I’ve had two interesting price match experiences at Best Buy.

The first is when I bought a vacuum cleaner. The web site said it was on sale for $50, so I went to the store to buy it. It was $100 in the store, so I made them price match themselves.

The second was with a MacBook power adapter. Future Shop, a Canadian store similar to Best Buy, had it for $95, Best Buy had it for $105. By getting Best Buy to price match, I got it cheaper because they will beat the price by 5%. Here’s the interesting bit though: Best Buy owned Future Shop at the time (they’ve since retired that brand), so once again they price matched themselves.

In both cases they did it without complaint, but they did verify the competing price, etc, as they should.

Interestingly enough all the futureshops that I’ve seen were converted into bestbuys by only changing the colour of the branding material from red to blue - everything else literally stayed the same

In my city they kept them as separate stores for quite a while, but in-store branding definitely changed colour. At one point, a Best Buy and Future Shop were actually sharing a parking lot. It was in a large "power center", with many stores between them, but still the same parking lot.

It took quite a while for Best Buy to finally rationalize its store locations and get rid of the redundancy. Some Future Shops took on Best Buy branding, and in cases like the one above one of them was picked to close.

In the shopping center close to where my parent lived there was a single store between the two. I remember it wasn't rare to see BestBuy labels in Futureshop too. They only closed the Futureshop once they merged them.

Bestbuy had a fraud lawsuit where they made a fake in-store website with inflated prices in order to avoid price matching themselves.

Wow! How did they think they'd get away with it? This must have predated the prevalence of smart phones.

It did. I remember this back in 2006, where a customer would ask to look on one of the display computers and I would have to let them know it wasn't going to work.

Couldn't you just walk over to the PC section and look it up there? Those computers are online right?

My pet peeve is when you have to have places price match themselves (in store Vs. online).

I was recently at Lowes, I had found a Saw Horse online at their website for $80 off, and tried to price match it to themselves but when the cashier looked it up it came back the store's price (even though I still had the page open on my phone, and at my home computer at home).

Then got treated like I was the one trying to pull a scam, rather than them discontinuing a sale mid-way through a work day, and me being caught by it.

You think that's bad? Best Buy's website would for several years display higher prices if it detected you were at a Best Buy store!

"It says $80 online" "Here, let's pull it up on the website, $100, you must have been mistaken" Head home, nope, $80.

They got caught - or provably so - when mobile data became better. "Weird, if I turn store wifi off and hit refresh by 3G the price magically goes down".

That ended up in a lawsuit, and no doubt some gift certificates via class action.

Nowadays Home Depot (and I believe Lowe's also) has in-store pickup, so you can often buy the item online and pick it up shortly thereafter.

I made the mistake of ordering from HD online and received a different product than what I ordered. It turns out that they reuse SKUs for different models so the drones will pull the usually outdated old stock on the store's shelves.

That's definitely a mistake on the store's part and should have been a quick return / swap for you.

What generally happens is: (1) associate is dispatched to pick an online order, listed by SKU and bring it up front, (2) they arrive at the bay and start looking around for a match, (3) while they are supposed to verify down to the SKU level, sometimes they say "DeWalt 20V circular saw" = "DeWalt 20V circular saw", grab it, and move on, (4) repeat for the next order.

That's assuming there's stock in the store. In the event it's Ship-to-Store, you add the additional touch of warehouse getting it right. Although in my experience that rarely goes wrong (because automatic verification, etc as things go out).

I always do a SKU / item check if there's anything that might be a problem. In my personal experience, it happens ~1:50 orders (usually with easily confusable substitutions).

My neighbor works at HD. He also works at a local metal fabrication shop. I've visited him there and watched him turn a flat piece of metal into a multifaceted high precision part on a metal brake using only his hands, eyes, and the tool. He helps me with my metalwork challenges often. He has two great kids at College and a wife that nags him to no end but that he adores. Drone? Hardly.

Target is notoriously bad for this. I got like half off an expensive supplement just by pulling up the website.

Target was nailed because if you had their app with location services turned on, the prices would rise when you approached the store.

"Target updated its smartphone app Wednesday night after a Minneapolis TV station reported that some prices displayed on the app increased whenever users approached a store. In one case, a product's price increased by almost $150." ...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/target-app-price-switch-target-...

Have you actually experienced this though?

That's common with some stores, like large department stores and mattresses being a common example. But the manufacturer has to be part of it.

And it's simply not common or widespread in electronics. Apple isn't doing it. Logitech isn't doing it. Etc.

There might be a few brands or product categories which do... but it's also not generally to avoid price-matching, but rather to sell a lower-quality product that Best Buy pays less for. They're not just slapping a different model number on it -- it also has less memory, or cheaper packaging, or a lower-quality screen, or whatever.

I think Best Buy's strategy is to just get people into their stores, hoping they will walk away with more than the thing they came to price match.

Kohl's has adopted an interesting strategy recently of becoming an Amazon drop-off location. By doing so, they get people to walk through their store, browsing their merchandise, if only via a brief visual scan. Once you've dropped off your return, they give you a card good for a discount on anything in the store for one day.

I think it happens, but not because of price matching. It's more about merchandising, hitting a retail pricepoint, or keeping the model in play for some period of time.

For stuff like SanDisk sticks/sdcards you see multiple SKUs for the same product all of the time -- they may have a clamshell sku for merchandising on a shelf or clip, have a "bonus" storage case, etc.

Apple is different because they exert alot of brand control. But PC OEMs have many models of similar products, especially at retail where factors like how long a CPU will be available for restock may matter more. The shitty HP Model whatever laptop on the shelf at Walmart will usually not share a model number with the shitty laptop at Costco or Target. Sometimes retailers insert their own upsell in the packaging as well.

Apple did this in the dark days pre-Jobs. They would have different model Performas for just that reason.

Absolutely yes I have. Those are the real model numbers from my experience. They also did the same thing to me about ten years ago when they refused to price match a Western Digital hard drive.

Depends what you're buying and how lucky you get I suppose. I've successfully price matched an SD card there, and a few other misc. items, for whatever it's worth.

In my experience they may be a little more careful when it's a large price difference. There are legit concerns that it may not be the same model/quality/etc.

Also TBF Sandisk makes this worse considering how often even inside best buy I'm scratching my head over why they have multiple items that have the same U/Class rating but different packing on the shelf.

I've had decent luck with BB Price matching since around 2010 or so, when they started worrying about Newegg/Amazon and were to some extent proactive about shifting their business model. On the other hand the types of items I've price matched tend to be specific enough that Part number shenanigans aren't a concern.

Yeah, I remember going into PC World (Ireland/UK retailer, very similar to a smaller best buy) to buy a micro SD for the Nintendo switch. They had the same micro SD card per its ratings and capacity in normal packaging for one price and a more switch matching colour scheme labelled "for Nintendo Switch" for €10 less.

It's hard to tell what's going on:

1. Re-labelling the product to catch the confused parent market?

2. An actually better product for the switch? (maybe better read IOPS that helps loading time?)

3. A worse product but in ways they think you won't notice on a switch? (lower sustained write speed perhaps, basically any SD card can outpace eshop downloads)

All seem equally plausible, but my guess is on 1 or 3.

Wirecutter claims that the Switch-branded one is currently the best price/performance wise: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-microsd-card...

They also warn that counterfeits are rampant.

They did exactly this to me on a Dell Spectre laptop at the Bellevue Best Buy this year, and it felt very dishonest to me, since the items were clearly 100% identical except for some mysterious tweak to the model description. They also tried to get me to sign up for a credit card for a big discount, then denied the card despite my nearly perfect credit score. Weird experience... I have also found that their price matching is dishonest and inconsistent, and you have to be prepared to just drive to another store or come back another day. That said, I still shop at Best Buy because their website is accurate and usable, and often the demo products in the store actually work.

Yeah, now you're wary and perhaps won't go there again.

BestBuy needs to watch out. Pissing off customers with sleezy tactics is not the way to go.

Sometimes they actually are different, where the cheaper SKU actually has some shoddier components or a planned obsolescence capacitor configured to wear out faster.

Now I understand why Asus routers have a special brick and mortar model number

SD cards were one of the few items where this happened with non-special SKUs. Off the top of my head, the only other product segment this happened with was cheapo TVs. Almost everything else, if there was a model ID mismatch, there was some indication that it was a "Best Buy-only" model (if only because of minor differences). The vast majority of products could be price matched with Amazon, and customers took advantage of it quite often.

If you really want to see this strategy in action, try shopping for mattresses.

I was tolk that's how mattress sales work. They basically have their own specific SKU or line of name-brand mattresses and you can't directly compare or price match.

Similarly, my friend was a contractor and told me the paint manufacturers would have paint stores with good paint. The same paint was available cheaper at Home Depot, but the sku would be slightly different and the paint properties like thickness would also be cheaper (in the quality sense)

They do this on appliances as well. I did get them to pricematch anyway, basically by being annoying. It wasn't really worth the discount.

The OEMs (SanDisk, in this case)must be printing out disparate model numbers to facilitate this phenomena. The codes that don't match up are stock screen printing on the package and not some in house stickers that BestBuy cooks up to make it impossible to price match. OEMs could be sick of getting undercut at brick and mortars across the US because of Amazon.

I thought the practice was essentially print on demand practice whatever customer wants a different convention with their batch. I don't think they are in the business of caring about the retail end.

OEMs have done this for a long time. When Circuit City was around it was very rare for the laptops to have the same model number.

Of course, often they'd do other little things too, like maybe a smaller HDD but a better CPU. Just enough to make it not really the same Laptop, but close enough you picked up on the trend.

Definitely do this. Different SKUs for different channels. If you look closely at the specs for say a 55 inch TV sold by a discounter like HSN, it will have one less HDMI port than the retail model sold by Best Buy.

Is it a true story?

The only time I took advantage of price matching, it ended up saving me money. The phone I was looking for was $250 on Best Buy website, but $220 from Amazon 3rd party sellers. I went to a Best Buy store hoping to get it for $220 and not having to wait for shipping. They actually price-matched it at $200 on the spot.

They definitely have made for Best Buy TVs. Even for other mainstream brands than their in house Insignia line.

Take a look at these two laptops:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-15-6-laptop-intel...

https://www.staples.com/dell-inspiron-5593-15-6-notebook-int...

The one at best buy has the model number: BBY-51FJVFX

The one at staples has the model number: STP-51FJVFX

Notice anything? :)

Yes. Those are real model numbers and my real experience.

Video games aren’t like this.

Funny you mention that. I tried to buy FF7R a few weeks back at Target and have them price match Walmart for $10 off. Walmart had two listings - FF7R at $60 and FF7R with a bonus "art card" tucked into the cover for $50. If you search FF7R on their site the $50 one pops up. When Target goes to price match, they see the $60 one. A clever trick by Walmart to offer something on sale without allowing people to price match it - the opposite application of the same trick being discussed in this thread.

Appliance companies explicitly do this for this exact reason too.

Did they learn this trick from Fry’s electronics? Because I had the same experience trying to price match there.

They all learned it from shoe stores, I believe.

I’m going to say that’s a local anomaly. I’ve never had Best Buy push back on a price match.

So that's when you buy it online?

How is refusing to price match considered swindling? Personally, I've never had issues with Best Buy price matching routers or graphics cards.

It's not refusing to price match that is the swindle - the swindle is promising it, and then using things like retailer-specific SKUs to avoid price matching otherwise identical items.

"Sorry, this is a 512GB-SANDISK-AMZN SD card, we only carry the 512GB-SANDISK-BBY, it's a different model".

The definition of swindle is "to obtain money or property by fraud or deceit". Neither is happening in the scenario where the price match is refused.

I would argue that making an offer that you know cannot be fulfilled "We price match other retailers!" because you know other retailers don't carry that SKU for identical products because it is limited to your store is misleading/deception.

I walk into Best Buy thinking I can get a price match on a digital camera because they advertise price matching. They say sorry, "this is the Best Buy exclusive version of that very popular camera, we can't price match it. You see it comes with a special lanyard in the box." So I'm in a position where I've driven to Best Buy, and either have to pay their price or go home and order on Amazon. So maybe I pay their higher-than-Amazon price.

The price match was deceitful, they obtained money from it. Sounds like a swindle to me.

Easily avoided if you compared model numbers from the 2 web sites before getting in the car. Besides, your issue is with the camera mfg for making not-quite-identical models.

More easily avoided by just ordering on Amazon to begin with, after trying it out at Best Buy if I feel like it.

Fraudulently wasting my time is just as much of an issue. The wrong occurs when a store works to deceive me. Whether the deception is successful or not does not change the mortality of the action.

Deceit: the action or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth.

In what way is tricking people into thinking they'll be able to easily price match not deceit?

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