TechBanyan

Best Buy Gets Sued For $54 Million By An Irate Customer

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Sounds irrational and totally out of the blue. Thats what I thought initially, but wait till you hear the complete sequence of events. Raelyn Campbell bought a laptop from Best Buy in 2006. She also padded up the purchase with a warranty for an additional $300. Some time later, in about May of 2007, a part broke so she took it back to the store for repairs.

The staff told her to drop it off and that it would take about two to six weeks.

The scheduled time came and went but she did not hear anything back from them. When she called, after about 8 weeks, she was not answered in definitive. In stead a representative by the name of “Agent Goodfellow” on the help line told her that the laptop was in Louisville and will be returned shortly. Again at the end of the month, she was informed that a part had to be shipped from Louisville and “will be leaving soon”.

In August, end of first week, when the customer inquired again, she was told by a store employee that the laptop never left the premises. The employee further went on to tell her, that in fact the store had lost her laptop and she would be compensated.

Sever phone calls and similar rigamarole later, that compensation amounted to a princely sum of $900 gift card. No surprises that the customer found it ridiculously low considering the laptop and warranty alone cost her more than this amount, not counting the software inside plus the effort, phone calls, lost work hours and most important of all, her personal data.

The company stone walled her protests for higher amount.

Fed up of all this, Raelyn Campbell contacted the Washington DC attorney general’s office and after consulting, filed her attention-getting lawsuit against the company.

54 million dollars was definitely a bolt from the blue, when Best Buy agreed to compensate her the requested amount, Campbell declined her original claim because of additional costs of filing police reports, consulting lawyers, and taking measure to deal with identity theft. Considering Campbell’s tax papers were on the machine, it made complete sense.

Catch all the details from here.

I too have a broken Gateway laptop lying with me which I tried getting fixed from Best Buy. But when the “Geek Squad” kid told me it would take about these many weeks to ship it and fix, I had dropped the idea. (I have another newer, faster, working laptop so I was in no hurry).

I often visit Best Buy stores and have had numerous interactions with the staff. Its nothing extra ordinary but I wouldn’t rate it as bad too. Had the Best Buy manager tried being honest up front about it from the beginning, the company could have saved itself from all this grief.

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