What am I in for with Best Buy?

January 17, 2012 2:22 PM

I purchased a couple of monitors recently from Best Buy to use with my Macbook Pro running Lion. I returned them to get larger monitors. The larger monitors kind of suck, and text looks horrible on them, despite all of the color calibration and terminal codes that Google has suggested. I want to return these as well and just go back to my old monitor, but I'm afraid returning this many monitors in this short amount of time will make me look like the crazy monitor returning man. Can anyone tell me what I'm likely in for? Anonymous because I am, for some reason, embarrassed by having to ask this question.
posted by anonymous to shopping (11 answers total)

as long as you have receipts you can do whatever you want. best buy knows the difference between a customer and a scammer/thief, believe me. also, who cares what best buy thinks?
posted by facetious at 2:25 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]

You won't be crazy-monitor-returning-guy until you go back a third time to exchange the monitors. Since this is only the second time, you'll be okay. You only take a hit on pride if you run into an employee who says "I told you so," but odds are that nobody will say that.

On a technical level, I've exchanged stuff at Best Buy multiple times until I got the right one, and I've never had any problems. The last thing was TV antennae which were returned twice until I got one that worked. It was no big deal.
posted by jabberjaw at 2:31 PM on January 17

They probably won't think much of it. I used to work at Staples and people did stuff like this all the time - they just couldn't find a product they liked. As long as you are within the proper time frame and have the receipts and all, you should be fine. Just be honest, you're not doing anything wrong.
posted by sarae at 2:31 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]

Are you sure you haven't updated the display drivers (or what ever Macs use)? When I got a new computer the text on my old monitor looked HORRIBLE (blurry no matter what display size/calibration I used), but then I updated the display drivers and now it looks perfect.
posted by littlesq at 2:36 PM on January 17

I don't know if this applies to monitors, and if so, if they explained this to you up front? My experience with BB has been buying two laptops about 10 years apart.

They have a $150 "restocking fee" when you return electronics,, which I called bullshit on. I asked the salesman, you was giving me a "re-stocked" computer to begin with..

"So this has already been used and returned once, and if I take one step outside your front door, never having even taken it out of the box, you are going to charge me a $150 to return it??"

"Yup."

I hope that policy went away, and I you don't get screwed man.
posted by timsteil at 2:40 PM on January 17

I work in retail. People who work in shops care far less about the customer than the customer thinks they do. Someone returning an item again will not be the most interesting thing that has happened all day. Nobody is going to go out to the back of the store and talk to someone else about the guy who returned things twice, because that's boring.

I might look askance at you if you bought something back, without a receipt, that we haven't sold for 4 years claiming that you bought it last week (true story), but that doesn't seem to be the case here. As long as you're abiding by the returns policy, it's quite likely that nobody will bat an eyelid.
posted by Solomon at 2:40 PM on January 17 [2 favorites]

They probably won't remember who you are.
posted by desjardins at 2:48 PM on January 17

Not entirely an answer, but have you made sure the display resolution settings match the native resolution of the monitors? Mismatching those is usually what makes text look bad.
posted by gjc at 4:07 PM on January 17

N-thing what was said up above. In my experience with returning electronics multiple times (I once bought a computer case, took it home and unboxed it, decided I didn't like it, went back to the store and exchanged it for a different one, came back home and started installing my parts, decided I didn't like the setup of the case, went back to the store and exchanged for a new one - all in the same day), the person behind the return desk probably doesn't really care about your reasons or intentions (unless you're obviously scammy).

If they ask you why you're returning it, you don't have to be super detailed in your response, just something along the lines of "It's not working with my computer" and tell them you'd like a different model. They'll likely ask you to go grab the one you want and take it back to them, and they'll punch into the computer whatever they need to and you'll be out the door in no time. Just make sure you put all the stuff it came with back into the box so you don't get hassled if they check. And make sure you have the receipt ready, I'm sure they'll appreciate that
posted by Geppp at 5:18 PM on January 17

Are you sure you're running the monitors in their native resolutions? Because LCD displays, unlike CRTs, tend to look bad at every resolution other than the one they were made for.
posted by ikaruga at 8:50 PM on January 17

I've worked in retail electronics. They won't care at all.
posted by dazed_one at 12:43 PM on January 18