I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about Best Buy.  Today, though, they’ve probably lost me for good.  I had decided that I wanted to get a laptop for use around the house, since I’m getting tired of being tied to my desktop (which is in my home office).  After doing some online research and visiting a couple of stores, I was ready to buy today.  I went in to the Best Buy in Lewisville, and after examining their available systems, I found one that I liked.  The problem was that there was no one available to assist me when I was ready to buy (despite there being plenty of people around when I started looking).  I think what finally did it for me was the overall noise level in the store.  Combined with being ignored, it made for a very annoying experience.

I’m currently writing this entry from a laptop that I purchased at Compusa.  The experience there wasn’t that great, either, although they did have someone available to take my money.  The salesman pushed a bit too hard to get me to buy the extended service plan (to the point of asking me afterward why I didn’t buy it and almost trying to argue with me about it, even though I had politely declined), and they tried to gather my personal info at the checkout (which I also politely declined).  Finally, the advertised price included two mail-in rebates, but now that I’ve had a chance to examine the terms (they were both online, so I couldn’t see them at the time), I find that both of them want the original UPC code.  I’ve sent in a complaint to Compusa about this, since it seems deceptive to me to advertise both rebates if you can’t redeem both of them (and their ad for the laptop definitely shows both rebates, which can be seen here).

Of course, the fact that this laptop doesn’t want to work with the Linksys WPC54G card doesn’t make me any happier (I’ve currently got a cable strung across the living room to my wireless bridge).  But that’s an issue I’ll take up with Linksys and the laptop manufacturer.  This is a new model of laptop, so there may be some BIOS issues to work out.

Update: CompUSA informed me today that they will accept copies of the UPC when there are multiple rebates.