Best Buy Says It Has Killed 'Showrooming' For Good

[MADem]

93. You perhaps don't know that there are people here in the USA who live

paycheck to paycheck and often don't have enough paycheck to last the month. They have to fill in the gaps with "the food pantry" or "mooching" (which is humbling and humiliating begging, essentially) off of their "rich" relatives. Who's a "rich" relative? Someone who owns a laptop and has an internet connection. Someone who can pay most of their bills, if not all of them. Someone who doesn't miss a meal. Someone who gets around on four tires and an internal combustion engine, not the used boots they bought at the Goodwill.

Where you stand depends on where you sit. There are people in this country who are VERY poor, and they are the "kindness of a relative" away from being on the street.

There are people who live in this country for whom a "mere" three hundred dollars is some serious money that might take a year or more to raise. For them to go to a big box store and buy a lousy little tv that cost ten or fifteen dollars more (money they could have used for genuine necessities) because they weren't in the Cool Club and didn't know that they could have achieved that savings is just a shitty thing for the store to do. It's basically encouraging two classes of customers--the snarky, cool kids, and the stupid victims. I don't like it.

As someone else said, I would recommend the store that went out of their way to provide good customer service by offering their lowest prices to all. A store that depends on the ignorance and lack of access to technology of the poorest to make their profit, though? Screw them.

I won't patronize or recommend them.

And you'll griping about textiles, and American socks, and American manufacture... in the context of a conversation about BEST BUY? Please--I don't think ANYTHING in that store is made in USA, unless they sell xerox or printer paper. It's all Chinese and Japanese and Korean stuff--and it has been that way for decades now. I really don't think your example works in that context at all.