It is 2:00 in the afternoon on december 23, when i get off of work at best buy in santa rosa. I had made plans with a friend of mine to shop for some nintendo wii accesories.
I was not shocked when best buy was out of stock on the wireless wii controllers, being aware of how popular and how scarce the product is. So i walked over to the target only to find that they were sold out as well.
Not wanting to then drive all over town my friend and i called circuit city (down the street) who told us that they had roughly 10 wireless controllers in stock. Being quite satisfied that we were going to be able to get the gift we were seeking, we drove over to the store to purchase the product.
Within 2 minutes of being inside circuit city we could not only tell that they were out of stock on the wireless controllers, but an employee had approached me (still wearing my best buy uniform from work) and said to me:
"My manager has asked me to inform you to either take off your shirt or leave our store and we do have a no shirt, no shoes, no service policy."
I replied with "Well you dont even have what i want to buy from you anyway so i was already headed for the door anyway."
Now i dont know if this is an actual circuit city policy that they refuse service to employee's of competitors but target, who is a competitor just a few buildings down from best buy, did not have any problems, in fact a target employee approached me offering to help me find what i was looking for even though we both knew it was unlikely he would be able to come across a wii controller any where else in the department.
I have informed my supervisor of this treatment aswell as my store manager and we will be contacting the corporate office of circuit city. Best Buy is too big of an opponent for circuit city to simply ignore especially when circuit city is already in the gutter and cant afford to lose anymore sales.
I am not pleased that the person recieving this gift will not be getting everything they were supposed to be getting. It would not have been a big deal had they simply said over the phone that they were sold out or had they not descriminated against me for my attire. Even had i had another shirt to change into it would descrimination for them to require me to change my shirt to be allowed to shop at their store.
They way I see it, it actually makes them look better to have a best buy employee shopping in their store because other customers are likely to think that there is a significant reason why i would be shopping at a competitors store. To me that would just attract business.
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