For a number of reasons, I am very much a non-Fan of Best Buy and will patronize any other retail outlet except for them. Their marketing practices and pressure make my rear teeth ache. Add to that the fact that 90% of the items in the store are at Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (best buy indeed!) and the junk that is at discount is just that, junk.
It seems their in-home service is also something to avoid.
From Associated Content:
Best Buy's Geek Squad: Conquest of Branding Over CompetenceGranted, had the author been doing regular backups of his system, he would not have lost five years of work but still, the timing of the hard drive failure raises my eyebrow... The fact that they didn't refer him to a data recovery service is egregiously incompetent. If I faced the loss of five years of data, I would have no problem coughing up a couple hundred bucks to have the service recover as much of the data as they can. I do some measure of consulting for clients in our small community and data transfer to me is the simple matter of bringing a portable hard drive, plugging it into their 'puter, copying the files they want to save and then moving them over to the new machine. Works great and no hard drive is harmed in the process of making this transfer. The Geek Squad is giving a bad name to geeks everywhere and a major black eye to Best Buy ( like they needed help with this). Scroll down and read some of the comments -- it isn't just this author having problems... UPDATE: Was just pointed to GeekSquad Sucks
Warning - Using the Geek Squad May Be Harmful to Your Computer
Face it, the brilliance of American business is not perfecting quality of products and services, it is in marketing, advertising, and branding. That is what the Geek Squad is all about. They have niffty language, make their agents wear uniforms and drive the cutest little cars covered with advertising. They say that: "Our mission is to alleviate the world's computer problems, educate people to fearlessly embrace technology and practice the art of human interaction." Sounds so noble. Their real mission is to make money, which is just fine if their services were top quality. But my own experience and that of many others who have shared their pain on many Internet sites is that the youthful Geek Squad agents have nice personalities but lack technical competence. The result is that when customers expose their prized computers to their agents, because they need technical help, they put themselves at risk.
Computers have become so crucial in our lives and when things go wrong it is like becoming seriously ill. So naturally your instinct is to seek professional help. But the Geek Squad does seem to adhere to the wisdom of health professionals: first do no harm.
One of the Geek Squad's standard services is called data transfer. Simply put, copy data from an old computer to a new one. For that they charge plenty. So what might be the worst case scenario or nightmare of having the Geek Squad come to your home to perform this job. Think a minute. What happened to me is that they destroyed the hard drive of my old computer and I lost the hard drive in it and, worse yet, lost over five years of all kinds of data and files.
And an interesting aspect of the Geek Squad business model is that if something bad happens and you have to bring something into a Best Buy store they do not allow their agents to physically take anything back to their store. In my case, I had to take back my old computer box, wait several days and then learn that they had destroyed my hard drive and data.
Were they so sorry that they accepted blame and responsibility? Did these military-style geeks offer compensation? No and no. They acted as if somehow it was a strange coincidence that the hard drive died exactly when their agent had removed it from my old computer, tried but failed to connect it to the new computer (that I bought at Best Buy) and then discovered when he put it back into the old computer that it no longer worked. And let me emphasize that when the agent let me know that he intended to remove the hard drive from my old computer that I was very concerned about the risk of doing that - but he insisted that there was no risk. So much for Geek Squad military-style competence.
