My husband loves his electronics, so he often gets gift cards to Best Buy for Christmas and birthday gifts, and he saves them up to purchase whatever new item is on his wish list. Well, today he went into a Best Buy in Richfield, Minnesota, located on 494 & Lyndale, to purchase a new VCR and firewall software, and went to pay with several gift cards that he had and the teller told him that one of them was blank.
They refused to redeem it and told him that it did not exist in their system. They want my husband to produce "proof" for this card before they will activate it... I said, "I have it in my hand and it was in one of those gift card envelopes and it says Best Buy - $50 right on the card... What more proof do you need that the card exists?"
The guy I was on the phone with stated that the card are out in the open, where anyone can pick them up, and I said to him "Are you trying to say that whoever gave my husband this card for a gift shoplifted it?" and he said, "Well, the card is not in our system"
My husband had to call every person who gave him a gift card, get their credit card numbers and give them to Best Buy so that they could try to cross check things to see if there was a record of this card being purchased. They called us to say that they could not find any record this way either. I asked what happens next, and they said nothing, the card is no good.
My husband then spoke with the manager and told him that this was a gift and he gave him all of the info we had. The manager said that if we could produce proof that the card was paid for, like a receipt, they could activate it, and my husband said "Who saves the receipt for a gift card that they are giving to someone else for a gift?!?" Best Buy said that if we had record on a credit card statement they could activate it, and we said "What if was paid for with cash?"
What if the cashier who rang up the gift card forgot to activate the card? The manager agreed that this could happen, and that is something that they would have to find out so that they could correct that problem, but he still was not ready to activate the card for us, so I guess that means that if the employee screws up the customer is the one who suffers.
I guess Best Buy has never heard of a thing called customer service, or a phrase that says "the customer is always right." I know that we will never shop at Best Buy again, and we are telling all of our friends and family about this also.
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