Best Buy: Absolute Freaking Morons in Appliance Sales, Delivery and Installation

Thursday, 5 July: My landlord orders a dishwasher on BestBuy.com for delivery and installation on Wednesday, 11 July. In an e-mail message to her after the order is placed, they claim that delivery and installation must be done on separate days: Wednesday and Thursday.

Friday, 6 July: Not wanting to take two separate days off work, I call Best Buy and speak with a gentleman in Appliance Installation and Delivery who helpfully reschedules both to the same day; timeframe’s still not available until the day before, but at least I’m limited to only 8 possible hours off work. Apparently stores can schedule same-day installation and delivery, but the website schedules them separately at first. No harm done, though; everything’s set for Wednesday, and I’ll get the timeframe call on Tuesday.

Tuesday, 10 July, noon: The Baltimore delivery warehouse leaves a message: they’ll be delivering between 5:30 and 7:30 PM Wednesday. Obviously, this is not compatible with same-day installation. I call them back; they can’t reschedule, but inform me that installation will in fact take place on Thursday, as originally stated in the e-mail. In this amusing saga, I’m told that store orders are always scheduled for same-day delivery and installation, BestBuy.com orders are always scheduled for separate days, and no one is capable of making a change to convert the two post-order placement. The warehouse associate freely admits to this being silly, and claims it’s being worked on at corporate. We scramble to rearrange work schedules so one of us can be home on Thursday instead of during the day on Wednesday.

Tuesday, 3:45 PM: An auto-dialer from the installation department calls to inform me that installation is scheduled for Wednesday between 2 and 6 PM. Installation before delivery, eh? Neat trick. I call the installation department back; they suggest getting delivery to reschedule. I try delivery again; they say no dice. I call installation back, they say they can’t reschedule until Friday. In case you’re counting, this is now the third distinct installation/delivery schedule offered. Told that I’ll be able to get a Friday slot no matter when I call back today, I decide to hold my 2-6 Wednesday slot for the moment and see what a few phone calls can do.

My sense of humor cued up, I call corporate customer care as suggested by the installation team. Or, I try to. The person I talk to eventually admits to being on the “Appliance Installation and Delivery” team… presumably the same people I talked to on Friday. Over the next hour, the computer system hangs up on me once, someone who actually claims to be from corporate customer care hangs up on me once in a claimed effort to transfer me to BestBuy.com, I speak to one supervisor and get denied a transfer to at least two more, and in addition to the previous .com/store disconnect story, I’m told:

• some stores can do same-day delivery and installation, some can’t, and the store should have told me which it was (that’s nice, but my order was online)
• the warehouse should be able to reschedule me (already tried that twice, chief)
• if Best Buy were handling delivery and installation instead of a contractor, I’d have been able to get same-day (why don’t you fix that for me, then?)
• corporate customer care will absolutely be able to fix my problem
• corporate customer care absolutely cannot even access my order, .com customer service has to do that

Tuesday, 5 PM: I give up, call for a Friday delivery reschedule, and start documenting Best Buy’s incompetence for Google to know and the Internets to admire.