Best Buy won't refund "hard drive" that turned out to be a box of bathroom tiles
The Consumerist's Meghann Marco sez, "Reader Sam ordered a hard drive from Best Buy. What he got was a box of bathroom tiles." Best Buy won't give him a refund, saying that he needs to take it up with the manufacturer.
Link (Thanks, Meghann!)
I got into my car, raced back to Best Buy and voiced my complaint. The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens. So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive and while I was checking the contents to ensure it was a hard drive this time, the store manager came up, took the box from me and said to take it up with the manufacturer.
the latest
latest episodes
WHAT?
Okay, there has to be more to this story.
I'm beginning to really dislike Best Buy...grrr.
I think this is the link that's left out of this post:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/fraud/best-buy-sells-you-a-box-of-bathroom-tiles-instead-of-hard-drive-wont-refund-315873.php
Best Buy sucks. I really resent being treated as a criminal for shopping there, having my purchases gone through and my receipts checked. I'm not going there any more.
Best Buy is the worst goddamn company on the face of the earth. They're the only company that drove me to actually cut my Best Buy credit card up into little tiny pieces and mail it to the CEO. Hint: don't ever, ever, ever give them your email address, even for a repair job.
Honestly, shouldn't Best Buy 'take it up with the manufacturer'?
I'm beginning to think that the word 'Best' ought to be replaced with the word 'Crappiest'. It used to be that BB was a good alternative to a lot of the other 'big box' stores. But I'm beginning to think that once a place gets to the point where they're really raking in the dough, they begin to forget about what got them there in the first place - customer service. There are a million places a consumer can buy a hard drive. People choose places like Best Buy because they've heard good things from their friends, or they believe that a large retailer is less likely to 'screw them over' than the shifty computer dude with the hole in the wall down the street.
I think next time I need a hard drive, I'll just pound some rocks together to make one myself. Seems like I'll likely get a better result that way. Sheesh!
Earth Man, or since you're going to run into far more companies that do that than just best buy, i would suggest refusing bag checks and reciept checks.
At best you don't have to put up with them any more.
at worst you get detained by security, and get to sue them for unlawful imprisonment.
The people here are so quick to jump on any corporation as some big evil conglomerate, it’s like a knee-jerk reaction to go along with anything at all that paints some company in a bad light.
I don’t know the victim in this story from Adam, so I’m not passing judgment here, but…
I know for a fact that customers pull all sorts of underhanded shit with returns. I knew one guy who would buy a big and a small hard drive, swap the innards and then return the more expensive one so some sucker could then purchase it later.
Best Buy doesn’t know if the person in this story was some guy pulling a fast one or a legitimate victim. If it is the latter, it is unfortunate, but it’s not like he doesn’t have recourse. Assuming he ordered it online, he paid with a credit card. In which case he can very easily contest the charges with the CC company and then go buy the drive somewhere else.
Or, if he ordered it online and the warehouse is so inept that they didn’t check it in the first place, he could mail it back for a refund and also go buy it elsewhere.
My GF manages a retail store (no, not a Best Buy) and every single day she comes home with a new story of some jackass customer who tried to pull a fast one on them and cheat the store.
If the guy in this story really is a legitimate victim, which he seems to be, he’d be the exception not the rule.
I don’t like Best Buy’s response, but I can certainly understand it.
Okay, there has to be more to this story.
The "more to the story" is that buying an expensive and small item from a major retailer, going home, taking it out of the box, replacing it with a worthless item of similar size and weight, then going back to the store claiming it was like that at the time of purchase is a well-known scam. For all that Best Buy knows (and, I might add, for all we know), that's exactly what Sam did here.
I was a retail manager and dealt with shoplifters and petty scam artists on a daily basis--and that was at a book store. You'd be amazed at the lengths people will go to in order to steal ten dollars. I can't imagine what Best Buy's loss prevention department must go through.
at worst you get detained by security, and get to sue them for unlawful imprisonment.
Funny you should mention that--it's another well-known scam. (and one that, IIRC, boingboing, to its discredit, has related approvingly) Go to a store and act like you're shoplifting, then raise a big stink if you're detained and get a settlement for a few grand.
...I know see that Aaronz made exactly my point just before me.
FWIW - This happened to me a few years ago at Target. I purchased an electronic shaver, opened it up in the car and noticed that it was a bunch of 'D' cell batteries. After a short discussion, Target took it back.
Solution: simply require either physical inspections of returned merchandise or UPC tracking of returned products. Most stores require positive ID when returning products, so the tracking really shouldn't be that hard.
Should've kept the tiles...better than the crap they pass off as computer hardware. :P
Aaronz, NE2D, have either of you clicked through on the link and read the full story?
This guy isn't running a scam. He's documented as much of the story and pulled in as much publicity as he can. Scammers don't do that. He's also paid full price twice for a hard drive, and wound up with no hard drive at all. That would constitute a highly unusual scam technique.
Who took the hard drive out of the box and replaced it with floor tile? Not the manufacturer in Malaysia. Either an employee did it, or another customer "returned" the hard drive box but kept the hard drive. Either way, the store is obliged to make good on the sale. They're not allowed to sell a customer floor tiles and wadded-up newspapers in a hard drive box in lieu of a hard drive. Confiscating the second hard drive the guy bought from them was also obviously wrong.
Yeah, some customers are dishonest. That's regrettable, but it doesn't justify Best Buy's behavior.
Screw Best Buy. I'll shop at Future Shop now. Oh. Wait. Future Shop is owned by Best Buy.
Why not the Manufacturer?
Seems to me that it'd be the *easiest* place in the distribution chain for an employee to nick the product, because you'd still end up with a pristine-looking shrink-wrapped box that wouldn't look look at all suspicious to the consumer or retailer.
Here's the deal with "taking it up with the manufacturer."
http://lifeinaustin.blogspot.com/2007/05/problems-with-sony.html
Long and short of it, I had a defective DVD that I could have easily taken back to Borders. I had a receipt, it was a gift, no-brainer. However, just to see if it was possible, I did try to take it up with Sony and got absolutely
frickin
nowhere.
The best input I got was actually from Best Buy who said part of a retailers entire reason for existence is to deal with the manufacturer. The makers of products don't like dealing with customers and generally try not to.
To me, Best Buy really failed here. Pulling a fast one or not, the next time I want something, I'll go to the manufacturer to buy it, service it, refund it, etc, putting Best Buy in a bad position as they've lost the only thing they do, service. You can't take this road as a service oriented middle-man and expect to gain customer loyalty.
So, not knocking the company, but perhaps just this manager.
Try returning a defective laptop to them. It's not an experience I will repeat.
If this guy keeps bugging their customer service department (which is also hell to deal with) they'll eventually do the right thing. Probably.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden,
Yes, I read the story. First, I don't see where it says that he paid twice. Second, the documentation and publicity have come after the fact (and on what basis do you claim that "scammers don't do that"?) He expected Best Buy to trade a hard drive for a box of tiles, no questions asked. Faced with the amount of fraud that Best Buy deals with, they are right to make this difficult for him, though I'm pretty sure he will prevail here. Scammers will read about this and see that Best Buy is not the easy mark it used to be.
Schmod,
The pages from the New York Post that were in the box is pretty strong evidence that the switch was not made in Malaysia.
This happened to me at best buy before. I was about 16 and had saved up to buy an awesome sound card. I went to Best Buy and bought it, brought it home only to find some other weird PCI card in the box.
I think it was a USB card, but at that time USB wasn't around much yet so I didn't know what it was.
I drove all the way back to best buy (45 minute drive) and showed them. They accused me of switching the cards and would not exchange, give me store credit, or give me my money back. I was just some kid, I had no recourse.
I drove back home, got my dad, and made my third trip to Best Buy that day. He is a lawyer so he said some legaleeze stuff to them and they eventually relented and let me exchange the card. They never stopped to think that if I had stolen the card, why was so eager to exchange the thing they gave me for the card I wanted. Wouldn't I have taken cash back and run if I was a thief?
Anyway - Even before that I thought Best Buy sucked. I've never found it to be "the best buy" in town, so I rarely step foot in there (that and their crazy receipt checking policies).
Note to Self: henceforth, open all merchandise from Best Buy before leaving the store.
If this is honestly as far as I could get with the manager, I'd probably call the police and have them come and investigate the store. If you bought a hard drive from a mom and pop store and came home to find it was full of tiles, would you call the police? I would do the same for Best Buy.
@NE2D:
"The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens. So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive and while I was checking the contents to ensure it was a hard drive this time, the store manager came up, took the box from me and said to take it up with the manufacturer." Quoted from the consumerist article.
If he were trying to scam Best Buy do you think he'd want all the attention that might come from writing in to a consumer-advocate website like the Consumerist? Don't think so.
He'll probably get his money back from Amex, then go somewhere else to buy the hard drive. Meanwhile BB looks like a slightly bigger ass for a couple days, then the swelling goes down and everything goes back to normal.
Moral? Take the extra few minutes and open large electronics purchases in-store in front of an employee, or ask them to do it for you. If it's rocks or tiles or sand instead of your TV/iPod/Hard Drive/DigiCam, at least you find out about it there and can exchange it with much less hassle.
Take it up with WHICH manufacturer? The HD or the tiles?
Reading the whole article (at the above links), it sounds like the customer is doing all the right things: contacting the credit card company, contacting the local consumer affairs and better business bureau, vowing to open all purchases before leaving the premises.
Here was an interesting quote from the article: "The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens."
"It happens"?!? It happens often enough that the employees will say "it happens"?!? Geez, Best Buy, maybe you should, you know, look into this??
- yeff
Best Buy purchases insurance to cover events like this. I worked in retail for years, and yes this sort of thing did happen in the various stores I worked in, but not often enough to damage Best Buy's bottom line.
Best Buy needs to give the guy his hard drive, collect their theft insurance, and hush.
Is it just me or is their a block of posters who frequently jump to the defense of corporations, the government, or the police, but rarely speak up in defense of those without a voice, ie, those who don't already have legions of lawyers and government officials to speak up for them?
Waaaa, poor Bestbuy. Waaa, poor police. Waaa, poor Homeland Security.
Sounds to me like folks just trying to come up with a way to aggravate the moderator and troll the thread.
[sigh] their -> there
Conspiracy theory #4: this is all a clever hoax, invented by a rival company to discredit Best Buy.
A few years back, I bought a flatbed scanner from BestBuy. When I got it home and went to set it up, there was a magazine addressed to some lawyer in the next town over on the scanner bed. Of course the BestBuy manager swore up and down that they would NEVER put returned merchandise back on the shelves and sell it as new. You believe him don't you?
I'd rather pay twice as much elsewhere than deal with the crooks at BestBuy.
Sounds to me like folks just trying to come up with a way to aggravate the moderator and troll the thread.
Or it could be folks with different perspectives trying to have an intelligent discussion/debate on the matter, rather than a yes-fest.
Wasn't there a very similar story a few months ago about a man who bought a video camera from Best Buy that turned out to be tins of tomato soup? I wonder how that turned out.
NE2D (18), if you didn't see where he paid twice, you didn't read very carefully.
On what basis do I claim that scammers don't behave like this guy Sam? IMO, the best basis for that claim is "common sense"; but if that doesn't suit you, there's also the fact that I've been working with anti-scam groups for the last decade or so.
I must disagree with your assertion that "Scammers will read about this and see that Best Buy is not the easy mark it used to be." I'm fairly sure that scammers will read about this and note that well before Reader Sam tried to buy a hard drive, some scammer had already successfully stuck Best Buy with a hard drive box stuffed with newspapers and weighted with ceramic tile.
If scammers take the time to read the story carefully, they'll also notice that a retail employee and the assistant manager at that Best Buy quickly recognized the situation and said that "it happens," which indicates that more than one scammer has already successfully fobbed off weighted boxes on that store.
If they're astute scammers, they'll notice that the store manager apparently assumed the second hard drive Reader Sam bought had been given him in exchange for the fake hard drive, which was why he illegally confiscated it. The store manager wouldn't have done that if he wasn't familiar with scam merchandise returns.
Finally, the especially sharp scammers will notice that the store manager is stubborn, acts without thinking, and is thick as two short planks; i.e., he's unlikely to respond intelligently to the problems that led to his getting stuck with a hard drive box stuffed with newspaper and tiles.
I don't think they'll conclude that Best Buy isn't an easy mark.
September (26), it would be less than tactful of me to emphatically agree with you.
Slawkenbergius: Nah, it's a clever hoax engineered by intelligent bees from Venus.
...The problem is that we're seeing more and more of these swaps happening, and less and less of them turn out to be scams perpetrated by the customer. Having actually *caught* two punks working at the Computer City I worked for once Chrisnukkah season as a favor to the manager, here's how it works:
1) First off, there's never just one guy involved in this. There's at least two, and one of them is either in loss prevention or in returns. Usually the latter, because...
2) The scam works best *if* the store has a resealing rig set up. This will allow the swappers to remove the expensive item, drop in the rocks/bricks/bag of turds, and then shrink-wrap the box as good as new. Most of the big retailers have the resealer equipment for the specific purpose of putting the shrink-wrap back on a box that's either a) been accidentally opened during case unboxing, b) accidentally and/or deliberately opened on the shelves, or c) deliberately opened by a manager to verify the contents at the request of either the customer or the manufacturer. You'd be surprised how often c) pops up.
...And then there's d), which is illegal as rape in most states, but it involves resealing a package that was a return and then placing it back on the shelves as new. In Texas, this is considered a major crime, and after I helped get these two swap punks caught and arrested, I also managed to use it to get a particular district manager fired when he tried to "eliminate" all returns by either refusing outright the return for the slightest "violation", or by re-shrinking and pretending it had never been opened.
3) Then, with the two - or more - scammers working together, they take an expensive item they want, remove it from the box, plop in something of equal weight, reseal it, and toss it back on the shelves. If the item is too big to toss in one's pocket, then they'll get a friend who doesn't work for the store to come in and pick it up as if it were a repair or RMA swap. Very rarely will they ship it out, as that leaves a paper trail. RMA swaps can easily be faked by simply not logging anything.
4) Now, here's where most swap scammers fumble - you *NEVER* pull that scam on the same item twice, nor do you pull that more than once or twice a month. Furthermore, you pull this only with a -hot- item that's in high demand. That way it redirects the heat of any investigation away from you and back to the manufacturer. Especially if the manufacturer isn't in the US, because those third world "peons" are "known" to rip off their employers in order to make ends meet via the black market.
5) And finally, here's where most managers fumble when it comes to customer satisfaction: if the customer wants the item he purchased, the odds are *VERY* high that he didn't go home and swap out the contents and try to pull a scam on you. If they want a refund and/or refuse store credit, YMMV.
...One other thing to consider: if the item that's been swapped has a lot of component parts that are required and aren't easily replaced, and only the main unit is missing, then odds are *VERY* high that the customer got screwed. I.e, an XBox replaced with a brick, and the box still contains all the controllers, manuals and cables. Granted, the customer *might* just be trying to get a new system *and* a replacement for a burned-up unit that died due to something that violated the warranty, but the odds of that aren't too high.
Bottom Line: Places like Best Buy are simply hurting themselves by automatically assuming a customer returing an item that's been swapped and/or defective is a criminal trying to pull a scam. Even if there *is* a scam being pulled, the customer is going to raise enough hell that even if he's lying through his grillz, there'll be enough doubt raised to cause lost sales to the store in question.
Of course, if they wanted to eliminate this altogether, they'd simply have any item over $100.00 openly inspected at the check-out, but that would take *way* too much time, and we already resent being damn near strip-searched when we're leaving as it is. Guess they simply need to accept the losses, or simply find another line of work...
I as well have had a troubled history with Best Buy and Best Buy.com (their story with my situation was that the two are separate entities - buyer beware). I won't shop there again. Ever.
Reminds me of an absolute classic combined DRM + packaging screamer which happened to me.
About a year and a half ago I bought a copy of a Too Many DJs CD, still sealed in its plastic wrapping from the shop.
When I brought it home and unsealed the wrapping it turned out there was no CD in it. A sealed, empty jewel case (plus album art) had cost me £10. There was no chance of persuading them that I needed another CD. Where was my evidence.
This was an object lesson that, despite the insincere protests of the recording industry, no rights whatever to have licensed access to the album soundtrack was actually sold to me.
Instead, I had agreed to purchase a worthless piece of plastic, with the final insult that even THAT wasn't in the box.
That was the last time I paid for a CD - about a year and a half ago. I don't plan to buy one again.
NE2D (18), if you didn't see where he paid twice, you didn't read very carefully.
I still don't see it. The nearest indication of that is "So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive." But later he says, "I might end up $300 bucks down the hole." The drive he purchased lists at $349.00 at bestbuy.com. If he had paid for it twice, he would be 700 bucks down the hole. That's how I read it, anyway.
It would be less than tactful of me to emphatically agree with you [about folks just trying to come up with a way to aggravate the moderator and troll the thread.]
I'm not sure if you're talking about me or not (I've been reproached by you before on my comments), but if so, I truly believe that I keep my tone civil and respectful even though I disagree with someone. I like this site though I usually disagree with the prevailing political beliefs. I'd like to think it's a forum where different sides can be debated.
I've worked at BB. There are so many crazy BB scams you wouldn't believe it.
However, yeah, this manager has no grounds to accuse this customer of fraud. He's probably in violation of corporate policy and is just trying to increase his "shrink bonus" (BB pays out the unused remainder of what it budgeted for shrink to the employees of the store as an incentive to catch shoplifters and not shoplift themselves).
This really should be no problem with a lawyer involved. Even if he were the scammer, they have no proof of wrongdoing, so they have to just suck it up and pay out.
I bought an Xbox once from BB off the shelf, I'd expect it to be new. I got it home, noticed a few scratches on it which got me looking at it, but I thought it was still new...until I popped in a Halo disc and found someone's saved games on the drive. Looking at the bottom of the unit I figured out someone bought an xbox and swapped the serial number sticker on it and returned this one, cuz the sticker was slightly peeling off.
I took it back and exchanged it. Hasn't stopped me from buying at BB I'm afraid to say, just because sometimes they have what I want at the prices I want.
I once bought a defective DVD from them and they refused to even exchange it, and they were so fugging smug about it, it was infuriating. I took the same DVD next door to Target and they exchanged it no questions asked, even though they didn't sell it too me. Let me add my voice to the chorus, Best Buy sucks!
My understanding here is that the guy paid for a hard drive, after sucessfully returning the tiles he had been given. Right? Then the store manager STOLE his just purchased hard drive.
I'm not sure about NY, but in New Mexico I can lawfully strike a thief, if needed, to prevent him from stealing from me. Fortunately, I can also press criminal charges, myself, regardless of what the DA thinks.
Anyone here who thinks the store manager did the right thing clearly isn't thinking at all. Once the return was processed and the new drive purchased, it was the customer's property. Anyone taking it, even if they believed the customer had committed fraud, committed a CRIME of theft. I wonder what the legal implications are for Best Buy to reward that sort of theft (conspiracy?, RICO?)
I used to shop at Best Buy all the time. I have bought three new laptops from them, and thousands of dollars in other electronics. I will never do business with those thugs again, this is far from an isolated incident.
It seems to me that NE2D is making very logical points. The fact that someone finds it distasteful to state the manager/corporations point of view is ridiculous to me. It's not a conspiracy, it's just using reason.
As a person that works in retail as a manager (even though I'm hardly a willing consumerist), I completely understand the manager being suspicious.
I agree, this guy is likely not a scam artist by all the noise he's made, but there is no way the manager could have known this at the time. All he sees is a guy walking in with a box of tiles claiming he got them instead of his intended electronic equipment... would sound fishy to me.
Yes, Best Buy as a corporation might be protected with insurance, but I assure you the individual store and managers are held responsible for any shrinkage (which includes return scams), and employee hours/benefits can be cut when a store loses money to such scams (whether this particular case was or was not a scam... insignificant to the matter as a whole).
You can stick up for the consumer, but how about the equally deserving employee who is trying to make it by on as many hours as the store can afford to give.
The manager made the only decision that could be made from his point of view.
What I find hilarious is that people think a retail store manager is high enough up on the totem pole to be in on some giant corporate scam. I care enough to make sure my store does well so I and my fellow employees are well off, but I could care less about pushing forward some mystical evil agenda.
It's not like the customer can't get a full refund; he already stopped payment. If stores made it their policy to accept any return request that came in the door, every scam artist would be putting tiles in a box... I already see that sort of thing far too often.
Why would you purchase anything from Best Buy when there is NewEgg?
/snark on
Why shouldn't we scam the corps, they scam us. They feed us plastic in our food, poison our planet, poison our culture and poison or government. Corporations live by one rule "Everything not forbidden is allowed". No, that's wrong, they don't even follow that. They rob us of our privacy, spy on us, give that information to a criminal cabal and then get legislators to retroactively declare their crimes legal.
So why shouldn't we take them for anything we can get? We are just playing by their rules.
/snark off
"Is it just me or is their a block of posters who frequently jump to the defense of corporations, the government, or the police"
On the liberal political blogs it's well known that some trolls are indeed paid GOP operatives. There is documentation to back it up and I think former Sec Def Romney admitted to such. They operate out of the Pentagon. You are pretty naive if you haven't figured out by now what's going on.
ny chnc w cld wt ntl th ss s rslvd bfr pstng n lrmst mtn-srpd rnt bt bg crprtns?
You get what you pay for, or not....including service, reliability, product knowledge, kindness, trust, etc. Try shopping instead for the MOST expensive product that you can afford, within reason, compare the difference, weigh the alternatives etc. You may find it a false economy to shop the cheapest price. Remember the Wal-Mart axiom....the lowest possible price also nearly always equals the lowest possible quality - and you are not just buying a product, but the service(s) that may necessarily go along with it.
This happpens all the time, and with even more expensive items.
Best Buy consider's itself a "closed box" seller, which means they don't sell opened items- or rather, that opened items are inspected, re-closed, and sold at a discount. To avoid losing money, Best Buy will not open an apparently closed box if it is returned, they will just put it back on the shelf.
Obviously, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to steam off some packing tape- or an absolute moron working the customer service desk to miss a staple that's been removed and replaced, or a seam that's been slit, and carefully retaped.
A few years ago, I met a family who was told by a BB manager that if the box for a big-screen TV they just purchased revealed an old TV, then they must have been the ones to put it there. I was working as a reporter, and don't know how it ended, but I know I went to their house and there was indeed one TV on the shelf, one in the box- and one really PO'd dad who had just shelled out some serious bucks for a used tv.
Same thing happened to my kid sister at WalMart with a computer (patio bricks in the box), but at least, they did (after some wrangling) take it back.
BB is more than happy to pass their losses on to the unfortunate customer. The only way you can really protect yourself is to insist on opening the box (at the register, or customer service) and inspecting the item before leaving the store (which is what I do).
I bought a receiver at Best Buy, got it home, and found out the receiver in the box was an old receiver that someone swapped out. I took it back and they accused me of doing the swapping. They even "threatened" to look at security footage (as if I could have done it right in the store). I finally got my money back and went to Circuit City instead. We stopped shopping at Best Buy for a couple years after that.
I recently bought a scanner at BB (yeah, yeah...I hate the place, too. But the price was right, and I needed it that day) I noticed that, at checkout, when I declined BB's extended warranty, the cashier made sure that I understood I had to deal with the manufacturer if anything went wrong with it.
We're living in a world of diminished returns and expectations. Operations like BB have figured out that they don't really have to invest in customer support anymore...not unless the customer is willing to pay extra for it.
The sad part is how easily customers have rolled-over and accepted their diminished position in the marketplace.
We're selling our souls for cheap underwear. A wise person once said this about Walmart, and Best Buy is the same, but for electronics. BB exists solely to push merchandise out the door, they really don't give a rip about you after you leave the store. I haven't been in a Best Buy in many years, and I'll never shop at one again.
This happened to me as well with a hard drive, though it was something else put in place of the drive, and they definitely took the same course of action. In the course of the many levels of management and customer service i went through, they did make it clear that in cases like these they deliberately make it difficult in order to weed out consumers who would be cheating them. Is this an employee theft issue? It seems this has happened pretty systematically.
It occurs to me that this is unlikely to happen in Japan, because whenever I've bought an electronic item here -- even small, inexpensive ones -- the cashier:
1) opens the box
2) takes out the warranty card
3) stamps the card with the store's address
4) returns the card to the box and closes it.
meaning that there's always a minimal assurance that the item in question really is inside the box. Maybe US retailers should try that.
That is really bad for the consumer(s). But here is a thought---what if someone that works at BestBuy is stealing the product and replacing the parts with misc. items.
I guess that is what happens when you hire the stupid, young, and pay very little. I have seen employees sell stuff out the back door, take games and cd's home and return them the next day or keep them. And yes I have seen customers run all sorts of scams including working with the employees to steal computers, HDtv's, musical equipment etc...
Most companies engaged in retail know that the biggest amount of theft happens internally, but will never publish that info. Nor will they prosecute employees that steal.
Hiring practices of BestBuy could be better and they could pay more, so people could live but they are the fast food of electronics today. In short, they will have to raise their prices if this becomes an epidemic and the consumer looses.
What OM described - I know a guy (no, not a friend) who did that exact return scam as a retail employee, so it does indeed happen, and inside the company.
Summing up all the lessons learned here:
1) avoid Best Buy for many reasons
2) open boxes immediately after checkout and inspect.
3) Purchase with a credit card.