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I'd like to see any information you have that shows that Best Buy is selling customer information and violating privacy rights.
You might want to look at
this.
From the article in
Lawyers and Settlements:
"The lawsuit alleges Best Buy has established a business practice of taking, storing, using and/or sharing customers’ personal or highly restricted personal information, without consent, when customers make a normal return of Best Buy merchandise. Their receipt indicates that Best Buy “tracks exchanges and returns … and some of the information from your ID may be stored in a secure, encrypted database of customer activity that Best Buy and its affiliates use to track exchanges and returns.”
Though the 11th Circuit later dismissed the suit filed in November 22, 2011 (as reported elsewhere), they did so because BB's activity did not violate customers' privacy in the current
legal sense, not because customers' privacy is inviolate in the
practical sense. BB is still going to glean and store information from swiping licenses which a lot of potential customers would rather they didn't possess.
And then of course there was that incident with the Geek Squad in which
a customer's personal nude photos were posted online by BB staff members who worked on her computer.
From a different report in the
Huffington Post:
"This isn't the first time a Geek Squad employee has decided to grab a customer's nude pictures from a computer. . . . In 2007, William E. Giffels was fired after he admitted to storing a customer's nude pictures on his personal flash drive, according to The Star Tribune."
Personal-information-sharing is part of the discount card package that greets, and cashier who hectors, the customer at every BB cash register. In this, BB is no different from Duane Reade or nearly any other chain that offers a discount card.
Violating customers' privacy without asking for specific permissions is something that major companies have done since one of our previous presidents signed the omission into law: BB is not being singled out here. They are being included because (1) your company makes money selling customers' private information and (2) the person from Dallas's accusation was that anyone who tried to buy Momentums at an On-Ear-priced discount was "screwing over" BB. BB is not some innocent enterprise to be tainted by the evil Head-fi member who looks for a substantial discount -- which the salesperson and BB would have to approve before the discount could ever go into effect.
Notice that I never mentioned privacy
rights in the
legal sense, as you did. That's because calling what BB does illegal would be a ridiculous claim and one you can't possibly be serious about attributing to me.
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Also, Best Buy does care about Head-Fi member's business.
Yes, BB does care about head-fi members' business, which was my point: Buying headphones at a discount is still offering BB one's business. Whether or not the discount is an acceptable one to honor is up to BB and not the customer.
The same is true of customers who combine discounts and coupons. Combinations might work in ways that seem too good to be true, but using them is not to be conflated with "screwing over" Best Buy.
The truth is that BB "screws over" entire neighborhoods, local communities and stores every time they move massive stores into new territory flanked by smaller stores, just as B&N and Borders closed innumerable small bookstores decades ago. (The irony is that Borders is now gone, B&N is losing money and, despite the growing sales of ebooks, indie book stores are making a comeback.)
BB is certainly leagues better than Walmart in terms of how they treat their employees, and their merchandise is far more useful to me, but that's not what you and I happen to be discussing.
Also: You seemed to miss the fact I was being sarcastic about BB not wanting head-fi's business (as was the gentleman from Dixie in addressing my post). That makes me skeptical about your entire interpretation of my post.
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For the record, I work for Best Buy. Specifically with regard to the headphone business in the Magnolia Home Theater stores. So I would say I have a bit of insight here.
You might have insight into aspects of BB's business, but you might also have a conflict of interests which I do not. Investigating corporate abuses is something I do on my own time and not for money.