Having worked for about two decades for Fortune 500 companies, I’ve seen my fair share of ‘oops’ moments. I’ve even contributed a few myself but, Best Buy’s recent ‘offer’ of a 52” Samsung LCD TV for $9.99 might be the biggest I’ve witnessed. Apparently, the offer somehow worked its way onto the Best Buy website for a brief period on Wednesday and in today’s viral world, word of it spread like wildfire through Twitter, Facebook, etc… I’m sure Best Buy received a flood of orders in the span of a few minutes. Can you just imagine the feeling in the pit of the stomach’s of the BestBuy web team when they realized what was happening and then the absolute panic during the scramble to change it? After realizing the mistake Best Buy corrected the price to $1799, which is fairly consistent with the market price for a product like that (although I can’t help but say that’s pretty expensive by Dakota PC Warehouse standards.) I guess the real question is how they’ll treat the folks that actually got an order into the system. That’s the measure of a company’s commitment to its customers. We’ve messed up a few times at Dakota PC over the years and some advertisements have hit the newspaper for products way below our costs. While they haven’t been mistakes of this magnitude we’ve always honored the advertised price. If we made an error of this same magnitude we couldn’t stay in business honoring it to everyone and the customer’s all clearly know Best Buy made a mistake. While I generally wouldn’t give advice to a competitor, my suggestion is that they create a offer at their cost or slightly less on a handful of other TVs and allow all the people who actually got in an order, the opportunity to buy one, and regardless give each client $50 gift card. They need to have it done within 24 hours to have an impact. If they do something like this, I’m sure they’ll win some loyalty from these folks (and their family and friends), if not, I’d expect the backlash to be pretty wicked. The true test of your relationship with your customers is how you react under adverse circumstances. Let’s see how Best Buy does.
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Best Buy $9.99 TV Offer Was Too Good to Be True
-By Bob Burnett
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