Response to "Are you being cheated by Best Buy and Dell?"

John, a reader of this blog, pointed out an error in my understanding of the Connecticut vs Best Buy law suit. He wrote the following:

On the Best Buy lawsuit, the point of the lawsuit had nothing to do with Best Buy having two prices. Take another look at the lawsuit link you included. The accusations are that Best Buy employees told people that they were looking at the Web site (with Web pricing) but they were actually showing them a look-alike intrastore site. If the employees showed customers the site and told them which they were seeing, there would have been no lawsuit.

What happened was consumers went into the store having seen a price on the Web site. Employees then tried to convince the consumer that they were mistaken and to convince them, showed them a screen that they said was the Web site. In reality, it was the intrastore site. At least that's the accusation.

That was the deception part. The "ripoff" part is that Best Buy has a price match policy that generally covers its Web site, so the scheme--if you accept the accusations--was an attempt to get out of giving the consumer the lower price.

Thank you, John, for reading my blog and thank you for making the clarification concerning the Connecticut vs Best Buy law suit.

I had only skimmed through the document and did not read the entire document in detail. Most of the 40 items in the document concerned the deception of how the in-store kiosk's web pages looked like the internet site's web pages but have different prices. I must have dozed off when I went past items 17 and 18.

Hmmm... This practice must be a Connecticut Best Buy thing. I've been shopping at Best Buy outlets all over the Washington/Baltimore area and never had any problem with their price matching policy whether it is trying to get the internet price during the time of purchase or returning with the merchandise and receipt after the purchase.