Former Best Buy employee here. I worked as a cashier at one store while I was in high school, then after I graduated from college I worked as a salesperson in the media section of the "Portable Electronics" department at a different Best Buy while job hunting for something that actually used my degree.
Working for that company definitely put them on my personal shit list. I know they've (supposedly) gone through some significant changes since I left them five years ago, but they've burned their bridges with me. They're very anti-consumer, and equally oppressive toward their employees.
When I was a cashier one of the things they had us do was try to get people to sign up for "8 free issues" of Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, or Entertainment Weekly. Part of the process to sign someone up to receive those "8 free issues" was to enter a credit or debit card number. The reason we took that information was because the magazines would automatically renew themselves after those 8 issues, but we were specifically instructed NOT to tell people that. My managers instructed the cashiers to tell people bullshit excuses, like that it's just being taken to confirm people's addresses (stuff that anyone with two functioning brain cells would question, and put us in a very uncomfortable spot). To make matters worse, if you wanted to keep your job, you had to lie to people about that shit - because magazine sales were valued almost higher than your actual performance as a cashier (supposedly the managers got bonuses in their paychecks for number of magazine subscriptions sold; I don't know if that's actually true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me). The only thing our managers valued more than magazine subscription sales were Product Replacement Plan (PRP) and Product Service Plan (PSP) sales, because they were pretty much pure profit for the company (and barely covered anything, and had tons of loopholes the company could use to get out of covering the stuff they supposedly did cover).
When I was working in Portable Electronics I mostly sold video games and movies. The attitude of the department's management was always to attach as much bullshit to each sale as possible, rather than actually giving the customer a good experience. They told the salespeople to tack on as many useless accessories as possible to console sales, even ones that the customer clearly didn't need, and especially if the customer was a parent or grandparent buying Christmas gifts. Best Buy didn't give a shit about long-term financial gain from having happy repeat customers, all they wanted was the big initial sale.
What got me to quit my job and never look back was my store's "preloaded" consoles. We had Geek Squad open up a portion of all our X-Box 360 and PS3 consoles, install any software updates to the consoles that they may need, and set up a basic user account with a generic name - stuff that would take any gamer only a few minutes and zero effort to do - and they'd slap an extra $50 onto the price tag that's pure profit for Best Buy. Management specifically told us to sell them to parents and grandparents who "probably didn't know any better." They told us to use bullshit buzzwords to make the "preloaded" consoles sound better than the regular ones, like that they're "plug and play." They told us to overstate how long it would take to do the stuff Geek Squad did, like assuming that the regular consoles (despite being brand new with whatever the latest updates were at the time of their manufacture) would need to download every update ever issued for the console at the slowest possible download speed.
I quit because I hadn't sold any "preloaded" systems, so my department manager took a special interest in getting me to sell one. He pointed out an elderly couple looking at the PS3 display and told me to get them to buy one. He hovered over my shoulder the entire time. I talked that elderly couple into buying a "preloaded" PS3, as well as an expensive HDMI cable they really didn't need, extra controllers that they didn't need given the games they were buying, headsets they didn't need given the games they were buying, and one of the mostly worthless yet hideously expensive product replacement plans. They came to my store looking to spend probably around $500-ish, they trusted me, and I made them walk out with around $1000 in bullshit they didn't need. I felt like shit, and still feel like shit, about it. I quit the next day. If for whatever reason that elderly couple, or whoever the recipient was for that gift, happens to be reading this - know that I actually am deeply sorry. I've been hoping for years now that those people were "Secret Shoppers" (people that management hires to covertly test its employees; they're like the retail gestapo) that the manager had brought in to test me.
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