Following up

The Kansas City Star used my complaint about Best Buy (first mentioned in an earlier post). Unfortunately, no one ever contacted me for a follow-up to Best Buy's response. I felt compelled to follow up anyway, so here's what I sent to the Star's columnist:

Thank you for your attention to my problem with Best Buy, as recently featured in your column. While I understand Best Buy's response, I don't find it entirely acceptable, and I wish someone had contacted me to follow up.

I will allow that "Bait and switch" may not have been the correct term to use in my letter. But while Best Buy can argue the precise meaning of that term, they can't change the facts: they advertised a product that was not available and sent me something else. If the 450 DVD sets allotted for Web sales were sold out, then they should have stopped advertising the bonus disc for sale on their site. Further, the lack of availability should have been noted during the order process. The inventory tracking capabilities of Web retailing should easily allow Best Buy to provide such information. Had I known that the Web site was sold out, I would have certainly gone to a Best Buy retail store to buy a copy on the release date. All they had to do was tell me.

Best Buy needs to improve its communications about such matters. I remain an unsatisfied customer.

I feel myself turning into Pierre Bernard, of TV's Late Night with Conan O'Brien. But I'm still not going back to Best Buy.

You'd think I don't have any real problems, wouldn't you?

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Another follow-up: I responded to a post in kansascity last week to correct some misinformation in an erroneous post about Governor Blunt privatizing Missouri's state-run license bureaus. While I agreed with the original poster that this was a bad move, some of his hearsay was just plain wrong. The facts are damning enough without the distortion.

Well, the fiasco continues. The downtown license bureau has closed, and nobody knows where or when it will reopen. A Star article ("Closed licensing office tests tempers") reports on the situation. People have to go to the suburbs to get licensed! As a BlogKC post puts it, "The office’s closure leaves the state’s largest city with no locations in its city limits. The 450,000 residents of KC now have to travel to the suburbs to find a fee office, while the 300,000 people in St. Louis can choose from 3 different offices in their city."

Way to go, Blunt. You can crow about dubious "revenue savings," but you're making a nice big mess.

But wait! There's more! Blunt is also not cooperating with state auditor and gubernatorial rival Claire McCaskill, who wants to find out what happened to the state-owned property in the license bureaus that were just handed over to Blunt's cronies.

Oh, it just gets better and better.