Lady Sues Best Buy

for 54 million bucks after they lose her laptop...

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/72016;_ylt=AkJfAYqKzm_fJdiCWQtu7ySXMJA5?comment_start=6&comment_count=20#see_comments

How exactly did she come up with the fifty-FOUR million dollar amount? kind of an odd number to put up....

this is based on her liability of mp3's stored. at 11k per song it is easy to see how most of our computers are worth 54 million.

I can understand the shop paying her back the amount of money spent on that computer, but 54 million dollars?

I didn't know computers cost that much in America.

the lady probably has lots of nude pics of her, as well as some private porn files of her and her partner...

Indeed!

reading on slashdot.com (a nerdie tech site) about this case. It appears that laptop was taken from a secure area, like a locked cage or locked store room. It was either stolen outright or with someone and another person stole it.

and then I saw this....

"I work part-time as a Geek Squad Agent within a Best Buy location (posting anonymously for obvious reasons). I have been told first-hand by more than one manager on more than one occasion to lie to a customer when it comes to damage and/or loss to their products that is the fault of Best Buy. On the numerous occasions I have protested this type of "customer service" I have been told that to admit anything is to open the company up to liability.

I roll my eyes at a lot of the complaints leveled at the company b/c I stand on the other side of the counter. However, this one is completely true and happens frequently on a wide-spread basis. I hope she wins this case and forces corporate to change a blatantly anti-customer policy."

and this....

"A friend of mine had a similar situation with Best Buy. He bought a computer from them, with warranty, and something (I can't recall what) went wrong, so he brought it in. He waited some two months and it never came back, with the geek squad continually telling him "this weekend we'll have it!" and each time he drove down there they'd go "nope, not yet, try next weekend." Finally, I went with him (knowing a thing or two about retail) and pulled aside the manager, and made it clear to him that we were extremely unhappy, and explaining that this simple maintainance had taken over two months. Finally, after hearing at least 10 different stories and being asked to call 5 different numbers for other people who were supposed to know where it was, we finally found out that it had been lost into the void. One would then think the problem would be resolved; but no! Apparently Best Buy and whoever shipped the laptop off to be fixed were arguing over who's fault it was and who should buy my friend a new laptop. Thats why when my stuff breaks, I fix it. Then I know where it is and how long it'll take, exactly."

and this....

"I've worked in a few different tech retail stores. And at each of them at least 1 person (usually middle management) is busted for walking off with repair units, RTVs, (note: return to vendors)or stuff right off the truck.

Heck, the first CompUSA I worked at in high school, the front end manager was busted for skimming the drawers. The cage manager got busted with his van at the loading doc moving inventory out. The tech bench manager skipped town with thousands of dollars worth of memory and processors. The General Manager got busted on tax evasion. All within a year and a half time span.

I had a friend pick up a job there a year later while I was in the military, they had all new management, with new vices. Instead of ripping off the store/customers, the wound up with a bunch of small time pot dealers in supervisor/middle management positions. Not like they were doing business in the store, but their smoke breaks were a taken in back by the loading doc. On the bright side though, they got great customer reviews for their friendliness and chipper attitude."

So then, that lady deserves her 54 billion bucks. That should teach a lesson for Best Buy!

[magenta]cozmonite61[/magenta] wrote: So then, that lady deserves her 54 billion bucks. That should teach a lesson for Best Buy!

Yeah, that'll teach Best Buy alot... but it won't be them paying for it, but the consumer as each item price goes up....

Jeffari-al-Texani wrote:

EdelBrock wrote:

[magenta]cozmonite61[/magenta] wrote: So then, that lady deserves her 54 billion bucks. That should teach a lesson for Best Buy!

Yeah, that'll teach Best Buy alot... but it won't be them paying for it, but the consumer as each item price goes up....

54 BILLION...does Cozzie think this chick is one of them Hungarian Jews?!?!?!

I was wondering, how much food would this $54 billion go towards... what do these hungry Jews expect to be fed anyways?

You might expect me to say, "hell slap it into the silly cow for giving them her lapper with all her shit on it", and if it were a laptop she'd bought elsewhere and left in, I might.

However, what was she supposed to do? The power key is fucked, so presumably it cannot be powered up in order for her to back her data up, and she cannot remove the hard disk for that will invalidate her support warrantee, and she cannot reasonaly be expected to leave it to be repaired somewhere clueful, as she has a support contract with the retailer. Her only crime is not having backups of the stuff already (I like this phrase I read once in an article "digital data should not be considered to exist until there are two copies of it in distinct locations").

I would be utterly distraught of some of my stuff were lost, really gutted, which is why I try to keep it all backed up and backed up (speaking of which, they're getting out of date, and I've not updated my operating system in months, these two facts spell "ulcer" unless I rectify the former before the latter). But it's not practical to make 2 copies of me media library, if I lost that through the negligence of another (be it a shop, or my vicious junior sibling doing "rm -rf" in the root directory of my machine (which would destroy everything, on that machine, all attached drives and the network shares from all the other machines), I think I'd have a breakdown, some of it took real effort to collect. And as for my own work, FFS I'm still gutted at having to throw out all the rotting floppy discs from my atari cubase, knowing that, although fucked, and no longer of any use anyway, they contained songs that I really loved, or never finished, or forgot I ever wrote.

does she deserve $54M, probably not, but best buy deserve to lost that much. Arseholes, it's like taking your pet to the vet for an immunistation and them giving it a lethal injection by mistake.

NOTE: do NOT take out a support contract with a high street retailer, assuming you can even get them to honour it, the machine will be operated on by (at best) MSCE holders, well versed in the MSMantra-32-XP "reboot reinstall reformat reinstall" or (more likely) dribbling idiots, who cannot even manage that. PC world and the other so called specialists are the worst, because they will do it in house and will make a bollox of it, at least a supermarket MIGHT send it to a proper service centre. Contracts with the people who made it are the key, that or being totally gung-ho and willing to fix it yourself....like me.

My new uberwinbox died last night, BSOD and would not restart at all. "hmmmmmmm" thinks me "I built this 9 months ago and the memory hasn't popped out of it's socket yet". Dropped the side off it, yanked the newer 2GB of RAM out and shoved it back in, problem solved. I can't imagine the cost and mis-diagnosis I would have faced if I'd had it done in a shop (even if they got the source of the problem, they'd keep my working RAM, and sell me new stuff at shop prices).

this is probab;y the figure her lawyer told her - in america they do the no win no fee stuff a lot more & the lawyers get a percentage of the damages, so they bump up the amount they are asking for to boost their fees.

One of my managers at Office Depot has a buddy who works Geek Squad at Best Buy. Many of those places use people who have limited knowledge in computers.

The story goes that if someone had A+ certification (the base cert.) gets "volunteered" to work 80 hours a week.

Circuit City laid off 3500 of its most experienced computer sales people in order to save money. Sales went down 6% in the first quarter they did that.

My advice? Know what you want to do with a computer, do some research online, get reviews, have a solid price point you want to pay. It's like getting a car a house or any other big ticket purchase.

Back up all your data onto DVDs and say an external hard drive. or in the case of my music, I have all the original source cds. Anything purchased online is burned to a cd that I have.

I have about 700 cds kids.

That's why I keep buying those Freecom HD's.

£80 to store the same as £30 of dvd's (you could get cheaper, but nobody puts backups on discs that are gonna delaminated in 6 months), and keep it all available. I only plug a couple in at a time mind you.

BTW, I forgots to replies to you again, that laptop looks great, but dump the service contract, your statutory rights cover all the things that may got wrong in it's early life.....assuming you HAVE statutory rights over in Jesusland.

Jeffari-al-Texani wrote: Wow, Best Buy acted smugly...so let's sue for 54 million...

oh well...best of luck to her...

I think that's the way Best Buy always operates, so it doesn't really surprise me, I've only been in there 7 times in my life, and I HATE the fact that they'll smugly ask you for your purchase receipt on the way out even if the a-hole at the door just watched your purchase get rung up just a couple of feet from where he's standing.

They were also obnoxious enough to make my mother extremely irate after some "installation" promises fell through because of their incompetence in the paperwork; she has never been so mad about anything in her life, to get her that riled up took quite a bit of doing. Nice going, a-holes, which is why I love Improv Everywhere's BEST BUY event so much..

Beyond Good And Evil wrote:

Jeffari-al-Texani wrote: Wow, Best Buy acted smugly...so let's sue for 54 million...

oh well...best of luck to her...

Improv Everywhere's BEST BUY..

Okay, they looked like Best Buy employees and freaked out the manager eventually... what was the big deal about the joke? Did they provide better service or anything?

As for the annoying guy at the door, they just can tell you fit the profile of a typical Best Buy shoplifter (probably male, two arms, two legs, two eyes, wearing clothing and shoes) and want you to know that they are aware you are there.

0_o wrote:

Beyond Good And Evil wrote:

Jeffari-al-Texani wrote: Wow, Best Buy acted smugly...so let's sue for 54 million...

oh well...best of luck to her...

Improv Everywhere's BEST BUY..

Okay, they looked like Best Buy employees and freaked out the manager eventually... what was the big deal about the joke? Did they provide better service or anything?

As for the annoying guy at the door, they just can tell you fit the profile of a typical Best Buy shoplifter (probably male, two arms, two legs, two eyes, wearing clothing and shoes) and want you to know that they are aware you are there.

There wasn't much of a joke for the Improv everywhere skit, I'll admit, other than if a big company can't quite come to grips with good customer service, then how can it possibly comprehend a lot of similarly dressed people "waiting for someone" in one of its stores? I'm sure they were ready to chalk it up to "disgruntled ex-employees" or some people from Circuit City.

at your shoplifter description....

Doctor? wrote: That's why I keep buying those Freecom HD's.

£80 to store the same as £30 of dvd's (you could get cheaper, but nobody puts backups on discs that are gonna delaminated in 6 months), and keep it all available. I only plug a couple in at a time mind you.

BTW, I forgots to replies to you again, that laptop looks great, but dump the service contract, your statutory rights cover all the things that may got wrong in it's early life.....assuming you HAVE statutory rights over in Jesusland.

Yes I usually use Maxell or Memorex discs. They seem to have the lowest rate of failures. Machines do break, so having something that is not a moving part as back up is not a bad idea. Just don't use the discs as coasters for my Coca Cola.

And Cambo, thanks for the kind words on the laptop. I decided to spring for the graphics chip. I'd like it to last 3-4 years so overbuild right now. If I get a custom build, I may have a better chance at quality.

Look Service warranties are a joke. You never collect on them. If time comes you need it, most places will probably screw you out of it. They are pure profit for the business that offers them.

I suppose I do have statutory rights. Probably the right to get statutorily raped by retail people. Ummmm no...

BonoShed wrote:

Doctor? wrote: That's why I keep buying those Freecom HD's.

£80 to store the same as £30 of dvd's (you could get cheaper, but nobody puts backups on discs that are gonna delaminated in 6 months), and keep it all available. I only plug a couple in at a time mind you.

BTW, I forgots to replies to you again, that laptop looks great, but dump the service contract, your statutory rights cover all the things that may got wrong in it's early life.....assuming you HAVE statutory rights over in Jesusland.

Yes I usually use Maxell or Memorex discs. They seem to have the lowest rate of failures. Machines do break, so having something that is not a moving part as back up is not a bad idea. Just don't use the discs as coasters for my Coca Cola.

And Cambo, thanks for the kind words on the laptop. I decided to spring for the graphics chip. I'd like it to last 3-4 years so overbuild right now. If I get a custom build, I may have a better chance at quality.

Look Service warranties are a joke. You never collect on them. If time comes you need it, most places will probably screw you out of it. They are pure profit for the business that offers them.

I suppose I do have statutory rights. Probably the right to get statutorily raped by retail people. Ummmm no...

dell

that's what happen when you pay $8.50/hr?

good for her. sue them suckers...