Circuit City offers various "no interest for X months with payments." This is supposed to mean as long as you make minimum payments there will be no interest for the advertised number of months. BUT: If you then buy something else that does not have such terms, interest will accrue on that item. That's okay... But they don't let you apply payments first to charges that have interest. Your payments are only applied to the non-interest parts of the account. This means that if you make the mistake of buying more from Circuit City, you will never be able to take full advantage of the no-interest provisions. That part of the balance will go down faster than you bargained for, while interest piles up for the other items.
In contrast, BEST BUY will credit your payment first to the parts of the account bearing interest, and then to parts of the account with no interest. This means they honor the no interest financing advertisement they make.
With Circuit City, they say on their site "We're with you." But read the fine print on the back of the bill: "Bank One will apply payments in the manner most advantageous to us" (meaning the bank)
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