Originally posted by: Cabrams
To stay on topic though, BB has the craziest pricematching policy that I know of. I am sure there are other companies in that short list too but you would figure that BB would pricematch there own website which on two separate occasions they have not done for me. I wasn't trying to cheat them or game them and in fact, I made many retail full-price purchases from them around the same time. At the end of the day, it is a crazy policy which some BB stores don't honor even in it's most conservative read. Make the policy clear and make it make sense and I won't question or complain. To some extent, I won't complain anyway, I will just spend my money elsewhere.
I agree, and in fact, I've posted a couple of minor rants about the same issue - price for item listed on publically-accessable corporate-branded website, not indicated as "online-only" price, go to store expecting to purchase that item for that price, and NO, somehow
that nationally-advertised price by that retail sales corporation, does not apply. It strikes me pretty clearly as "false advertising". I've had that happen at both Staples and OfficeMax, at different times, and very nearly happened to me at CompUSA.
The Staples incident was fun, I looked up the product price on some CDRs (think it was some 100-pack for $20 OTD or something), but didn't make a printout (no printer hooked up). So I go to the store, and they have them priced at $39 on the shelf. I mention to the CSR that their web site shows the price of that item at $20. The guy working there tried to pull up the item using the SKU, and it just plain *wasn't there*. Yes, this was at the time that Staples was pulling sales items off of their web site intentionally, during a sale. Ostensibly, the reason for this was generally understood in the ATHD forum that they wanted to drive traffic into their retail stores, by preventing people from ordering the item for that low a price online. However, in this case, the retail B&M had somehow not recieved a price-change order for that item, and with the product pulled from their web site, there wasn't anything to PM themselves to. The guy working there did seem to think it was pretty odd, that not only couldn't he find the CDs at the sale price that I claimed, but that the product SKU
wasn't there at all.
I've been given the story, by the manager of a store from each of both respective corporate chains, that their ".com" site, is a
seperate company altogether from their retail store.
Somehow, I really, really doubt that. Even if it is technically true for tax-reporting or other legal/financial reasons, it is severely misleading to consumers.
Especially because the web sites carry the same products, with the same SKU numbers, and one can even look up local stores on the web site, including looking at sale flyers, and also order merchandise for in-store pickup via their web sites.
Clearly, with that much "integration" between the retail stores and their web sites, along with the sharing of the same corporate branding and "trade dress", then they cannot be "totally seperate companies". Presenting that corporate line to customers is insulting their intelligence, just because a local B&M store manager doesn't want to lose a few $$$ on an item. (Of which, ironically, they claim to PM other competitor's store prices. Yet they won't honor their own nationally-advertised (via their internet web site) prices.)