Circuit City Bad Business Practice

This is a letter that I wrote to a local newspaper relating my experience with Circuit City this weekend.

Hello. My name is Tripp and I'm from Greenville. I thought I would relate this story to you in case it could help shed light on some shady business practices being used by a local Columbia business. This was from this past Saturday (7/22/2006).

I was in town with my brother visiting my mother. She wanted a new television since the one she had was about twenty years old so we headed down to the Circuit City near Columbiana Mall. The salesperson in the television department was friendly enough and steered her towards a particular Samsung TV (the TV was listed a little below $2900 - $2896 I believe). My mom eventually decided that was the one she wanted and also picked out a TV stand plus stereo system to go with it. Circuit City was running their usual deal where you can get their credit card and pay no interest for twelve months. My mom applied for it and was flat out denied. She was a little upset because her credit is very very good. But since there was nothing we could do we headed over to Best Buy. Both stores have price matching so we figured we could try their credit system to see if we got different results.

The first thing my mom did was go to the service desk and check to ensure she could get credit through their provider. She was awarded credit at Best Buy so we were all set. The price on the TV at Best Buy was around $3400 so we asked the sales person to price match it to Circuit City. The person called up the Circuit City down the street and was quoted $3150 as the price on the same TV that we had seen advertised for much less not twenty minutes earlier. That didn't make any sense to us so we climbed back in the car and rode back down to Circuit City. Upon arriving at the store, we noticed that the price sign for the TV had been removed from the display. This is where things get interesting. We had one of the employees locate the sales person who had helped us earlier (I believe his name was Josh). Josh comes up from the back of the store and proceeds to tell us that the price that they had up earlier was no longer valid and there was no way they were going to let us get the TV for that price at Best Buy. His only rationale for this decision was that "they would do the same thing to us." We further questioned the guy and asked how he could do this when they have an advertised price matching policy. Again - "they would do the same thing to us." He's answering all of these questions with a smile on his face and even says "thank you" when we tell him that he is enforcing very shady business practices. We couldn't believe it! My mom even went and got the store manager. We got the same story from him. Needless to say we left the store very upset.

We ended up going to hh gregg and my mom related the story to the store manager there. The store manager there ended up selling her the TV for less than either Circuit City or Best Buy! She also ended up buying a nice set of stero equipment and TV stand (and received 12 months no interest like she wanted). Circuit City used to be my store of choice where I would buy most of my computer equipment / electronics. That will not be the case in the future.....

Tripp