Ripoff of the Year: Best Buy’s $130 PS3 Offer
- Scribbled on September 22nd, 2009 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Sony PlayStation 3, WTF
Loot-Ninja has uncovered the Ripoff of the Year by Best Buy, who will kindly offer to do the following things for you:
- Set up and configure your PlayStation 3
- Install the latest firmware updates (!)
- Set up and configure user accounts with parental controls
- Set up and configure an online account
The Geek Squad will do this for the low, low price of $130. That’s right: $130, just less than half the current $299.99 price tag of the console itself.
My God, the difficulty of installing the latest firmware update (which the PS3 does automatically)! However, you know there are plenty of rubes that will fall for this (legal) scam.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Does that also include emptying the customer’s drool cup?
September 22nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Here’s my story:
Just before I went to PAX I popped by Best Buy to pick up a Netbook computer for the trip. Because I had no intention of being stuck with Windows Vista Home Basic I also picked up an external CD/DVD burner. Unfortunately the one I was looking at didn’t ID which discs it supported. It didn’t even say if it was a writer or a re-writer, which I thought was odd, HP is usually better about those things.
So there I was, standing in line at the GeekSquad counter waiting for information.
Ahead of me in line was a blonde woman reading the Geek Squad the riot act. She had bought a Wii, she wanted to connect it to the Internet and Best Buy (rightly) told her to buy a wireless router.
What she couldn’t figure out was how to connect the Wii to the router along with her computer and whatever else she wanted to connect and she was MAD. I mean screaming, yelling mad. Mad that she bought the Wii. Mad that Best Buy “talked her into” a wireless router and extremely angry that they now wanted to charge her a fee to set it all up properly.
So I said “Excuse me, maybe I can help. On the Wii screen you need to go into the settings and tell it how to connect to the network. You might also need to connect to the wireless router and set it up for DHCP and assign out IP addresses correctly to the Wii…”
To which her reaction was, and I quote: “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT!!! I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO GO TO COLLEGE TO KNOW THIS STUFF!!!” She then stormed out vowing to return every piece of gear she had purchased.
These are the people this service is targeting. They don’t know, they don’t have the capacity to find out for themselves and they aren’t willing to listen to others. The $130 price tag is a stupidity tax, and in that light is really far less expensive than it probably should be.