How big is your town?
To be outside a 15 mile radius they would have to be a flipping long way out of town! And they will be right next to their only real competition Maplin and Curry\Dixons on out of town estates anyway.
Best Buy is opening its first store in Thurrock, Essex tomorrow morning, but it will not have a working ecommerce site until autumn. The Essex shop is one of four due to open this year. It promises 50,000 square feet of floor space. But Best Buy will not have a functioning website ready until the autumn - a spokeswoman said …
When I say small IT retailers I sure as hell don't mean PC World or Currys, i'm talking small shops.
By undercutting I mean big businesses buying pallets full of hardware, selling them at a loss to get more business and trying to recope the loss else where. Small retailers can't do that.
So to recope this cost they charge high prices for other things such as Windows reinstalls etc.
Maybe it will be different across the pond, but here in the US, people often call Best Buy "Worst Buy" because of their dirty tricks. The website, consumerist.com, is filled with horror stories about Best Buy and their subsidiary Geek Squad. Some of their dirty tricks include mandatory "optional" extras. I shop at Best Buy, out of necessity and not by choice. If you are alert to the games they play, you'll be fine.
PCWorld to me. They do the completely optional extras that are not listed as optional and included in the shelf price. Things like "hp laptop, only £400 with norton internet security" when it's only £350 without.
As PCWorld are going down the toilet, even when they're the only one in the market, it seems an odd time to open a like for like competitor.
It does sound like PC World, but manages to be even more soulless, depressing and shamefully disingenuous. Made the mistake of going into one or two in NYC and overheard worse advice than I've ever heard in PC World.
I did see them handing out flyers near London Bridge y'day and hoped that it was a different Best Buy. Unfortunately not.
...but have generally had positive experiences - though I've never used the Geek Squad, for obvious reasons. The customer service and so forth is generally good, which for me means being left to my own devices unless I need someone to find something specific.
I tend to use BB as a fallback if I need something -now-, which in my business happens often enough for me to throw a few grand a year at them. I haven't found any reason to slate them with the extremity often done, but then I'm not wandering in asking which TV to buy, and they probably know me by now.
I did a quick calc using the OS maps and Novatech are inside the 15 mile limit. As is the PC world store at... Hedge End hmmm just like the PC world store at Lakeside. So my guess is that all the prices will be the same or 1p less than PC world but the will have a problem with Novatech unless they plan to nick all the Novatech customers with a massige advertising campaign.
I'll carry on using them though. They have given me great service over the years.
The arrival of BB might be why Novatech are having a store revamp next month.
BB == Big Brother naturally.
You don't *have* to shop there. You don't *have* to use GeekSquad's service. As one of the other posters said, he's using it as a backup. Same here in the US.
What's wrong with another company trying to muscle in on the existing market? If the service and prices at the existing stores are as good as they say you are, there shouldn't be a problem and BB will fold within a year, right?
And, as with everything, people probably should be doing their homework before buying something, goes for any store.
Bet Buy Mobile here in Canada advertises low prices but when you go in to buy you find out that there is only a "manufacturer's warranty". To be able to return it to the store even if defective you have to pay extra for their warranty. Another malpractice is to bundle options so that if you need an item such as a cable, you end up buying (and paying for) 3 other items you don't want. Needless to say I really hate that and don't shop there anymore.
In the UK, the sale is between the shop and you.
if the ttem sold turns out to be faulty, within 4 weeks, shop must replace or refund.
4 weeks to six months, they must at least repair (unless they have PROOF it was OK when you bought it)
there's also Section 75 if you bought it on the credit card.
Sooty's bang on, there.
Do your homework, and check out what you need online first.
My Desktop PC's monitor went down a couple of months back (two CRT guns, red and green, went at almost the same moment, dammit), so it made the perfect moment to upgrade to an LCD monitor. Having decided via my phone's web browser (or I would have been well and truly up the creek) on the 22" LG W2243 (Analogue), it was a choice of Comet or PC World. PC World were a fiver more expensive, but had them in stock. They got my hard earned wedge. And no, I didn't want extended warranty. No, I already had a cable (there's one in the box as well), and so on.
Thus, if you go in forearmed, and forewarned, you should encounter no problems at all.
Let me know how it works out when the item breaks down, because by all accounts, that's when you realise the huge mistake of buying from PCWorld (and other DSG clones) - they'll take your money, but once they have it you're persona non grata.
For a damaged laptop power supply, under warranty, a friend was told he had to send in the whole laptop! No laptop, no service! Other friends have had huge issues trying to get items repaired after the warranty ran out (even just by a day or two) - despite the sale of goods act saying a warranty is in addition to your rights to purchase goods of durable quality.
I would never buy anything more substantial than a USB stick from them - and I wouldn't buy one of those unless I was desperate, as their prices are a ripoff.
Seriously, DSG (Dixons, Currys, PCWorld) - AVOID. Google for due dilligence and recoil in horror.
If they were REAL geeks and knew a decent amount about computers or software they'd be working in the IT industry... not on peanuts salaries for high street retailers fixing Joe Blogs virus infections...
I wouldn't trust them to use the on button, let alone fix the computer - at best they are kids who think they know something because they once re-installed Windows (badly) after one of their gamer mates told them they could get extra fps by doing so.
Definitely do your research on how BB acts here in the US. Between the craziness of the Geek Squad employee's behavior, getting caught having two sites (external and internal to the store) that showed different prices, 'optimization' of computers, and the nightmare around their price matching policy, I wish the people of the UK good luck.
As another poster mentioned, consumerist.com has a whole slew of stories about BB and their ilk.
Best Buy is a fine store if you know what you're doing. They make their money exploiting the ignorance of customers, so most Reg readers would probably find it useful when looking for a quick pick-up of some specific product.
Typical example is they'll have a good price for some primary product (say a TV), and then try to screw you by charging $80 for an HDMI cable (they're big on Monster Cable), $150 for a wall mount, and $300 for a largely worthless extended warranty.
Really what the world needs is more Fry's Electronics. It's been years since I've lived by one, but that place was great.
Agree with you all the way, though when I was in Southern California for a few months last year and needed various tech bits I found Fry's disappointing in terms of range compared to what I remembered from a previous visit. In the end the (nearer) Best Buy store was my usual port of call - buy the kit that's 'on offer' and refuse all the extras and you're sorted.
I also didn't have a problem with their customer service. They refunded me a defective MP3 player no questions asked, even though I had been using it for a couple of weeks and had lost some of the packaging.
Thanks to all you that have told us of this Corp and their antics I for one will avoid them like the PLAGUE any how I have 3 online retailers that I can collect from within an hour of where I live as well as PC World.OH and if they do try any thing underhanded in the UK Trading Standards will no doubt love to see them
One can only hope that their sales people leave us alone to browse without being bothered by sales people. In one BB store in the US I was interfered with ten times in twenty minutes by sales people wanting to help me find things. Why can they not understand that if I want any help I'm quite able to ask? On that particular occasion I was close to asking to see the manager and making a complaint about harrassment. It's almost as bad in every other BB store I've been in over there.
I don't know what experiences you've had with independant IT retailers but at the ones I worked for in the past we provided the best service we could.
I saw a PC World repair job last month. They charged a person £130 for a reinstall of XP from a recovery disk. The recovery disk was SP1, they didn't even bother to install any updates.
I charged the person an hour labour to install all the updates, install an AV scanner/firewall and a chkdsk/defrag. Isn't that value for money?
You want cheap toilet rolls buy them in one of the big 4 supermarkets.
You want decent tasting beef go to the butcher.
From the big guys buy what is on offer and ignore 'link sale' items and its cheaper than you can get elsewhere.
Used to be that a tin of beans cost 70p in the local store and that's what you paid for them. They cost 18p for own brand at Tescos. The local store now only sell Heinz at 50p.
I can buy a some tat for £400 at 'lights are us superstore' , I can get a cheap one from a DIY shed or I can get an attractive and serviceable light fitting at a decent cost from a local electrical factor if I look around. Before the electrical factor was charging £400 as well. The DIY sheds have brought the price down.
Competition is good. If the service is poor from their support people and the cost is high then it can't do independent support people any harm setting the bar so low.