MrConsumer celebrates his birthday in January and has been receiving birthday offers from various retailers and restaurants.
Among them was an email from Best Buy offering a surprise:
What could it be? A big screen TV? $100 off an item of your choice? A free major appliance?
Clicking through to Best Buy, these delusions of grandeur quickly evaporate.
Okay… I’ll take 10% off. But a big catch looms with the dreaded list of exclusions.
*MOUSE PRINT:
At least they didn’t exclude sale items… or did they? Two savvy readers point out the first line of the disclaimer which says “Markdowns taken from regular or Was prices.” What does that mean? Is that just standard language in disclaimers that many retailers use, or did they really mean to say that the 10% discount is only applicable to regular priced items?
They DID exclude sale items. The very first sentence says discount to be taken from the REGULAR or WAS price, so even if they didn’t technically exclude sale items, they excluded sale PRICES.
No wonder they are going bankrupt!
Sure, they don’t exclude sales items, but if you use the coupon you get the discount off the regular price, not the sale price. (Check out the first sentence.)
Circuit City, redux.
Nope, they didn’t exclude sale items. They did exclude sale prices.
What’s left in the store?
Pretty long list of exclusions…
In response to a previous comment I think it’s worth noting that Best Buy is not going bankrupt. Their stock has skyrocketed recently and although some people seem to think the projections are overly optimistic more growth is expected in 2018.
That being said it doesn’t change how ridiculous this birthday offering is. Whenever I get any kind of offer or see a coupon with that much fine print I just toss it into the trash.
At least they aren’t requiring you to spend at least $X to get a discounted item.
This looks like Bed Bath & Beyond goes to best buy.
This looks like one of the Dick’s Sporting Goods promotions.All kinds of exclusions there too.
Well bobl I think the list of what you could get 10% off would be smaller than what is excluded.
Still would be useless.
Kind of like the Macy’s coupons I used to get. They would have save a lot of ink by changing the list of to ” Excludes anything you might actually want to buy.”
These are the type of exclusions usually associated with a 50% off sale. To go to this much trouble to cheat customers out of a mere 10% discount has got to be a new low.
This is one of those situations where the list of inclusions is probably shorter than the list of exclusions.
I wonder if the 10% discount is mainly for Best Buy branded merchandise.
Doesn’t their marketing department have any clue as to how much ill-will is created by such a ridiculously long list of exclusions? Happy Birthday, indeed! Gimme a break!
I remember when they used to give a $5 certificate to use on anything for your birthday. That was good for me to reduce the price of a dvd, video game, or CD