SuperJason’s Personal Blog

Yesterday was the adventure of getting my new Sony Projection TV. I headed off to Best Buy with my stack of coupons, certificates, gift cards, and credit cards. My friend Shawn from work also came along to help.

My first issue was finding someone in the home theater department that could help me pick out a DVD player, find all the cables, and get my TV from the warehouse. I found a girl that didn’t seem to know much, but she knew where things were located. She ended up passing on most of my questions to a guy there that had a really strange personality.

The guy she found to help her had an “interesting” personality. He started explaining the “protection plan” with the 90% markup to me, and tried to convince me that I would die without it. I told him that I always self-insure everything that I buy. He then asked me the strangest question. He asked “Do you align your guns?” My response, of course, was “I don’t have any guns!” He clarified that he meant the guns in the television. I didn’t know if I should have felt stupid, or if this guy was stupid.

He went on to explain that you need to realign the guns every year, and when he had it done in the first year, it cost him nearly $200 for his $12,000 TV. He must not have purchased the protection plan. I know a lot of people with projection televisions, and I’ve never heard of them needing regular maintenance at any time in the first 5 years.

After deciding about everything I had to purchase, I decided to use the checkout in the home theater department. The same girl that helped me originally offered to check out everything for me.

Meanwhile, the original weirdo that was helping me was using a computer hooked up to a large LCD television. He asked how I would like to use that as a monitor. I explained that the resolution was too low. He said that it displayed at 1024×768, which he apparently thought was sufficient. I explained that I usually use 1600×1200. Not to be outdone, he then explained that his $14,000 TV could display at 1900×1000. Yes, that’s right, his TV just cost him $2000 more than the last time he mentioned the price, it’s not a typo.

Ok, back to the girl checking everything out. I started handing her the coupon, the Best Buy gift cards, the American Express gift cards, and then the reward zone certificates. That’s when the trouble started. Apparently their system is so inflexible that the reward zone certificates MUST be entered first. A manager showed up and voided the transaction.

After voiding the transaction, they realized that it wouldn’t refund the value back to the American Express gift cards. They had to call American Express, which was basically closed because of the time of day. The store I was at had recently moved, so they were actually considered a new store, so they didn’t have the magic number that they needed to prove that they were not someone trying to get free money. It took then over an hour on the phone to find someone that not only could credit the money back, but also believed that they were in fact working for the store.

Since I had a lot of time to look around, I found another set of cables that were made by the same company (Monster), and were $10 cheaper. I asked “Mr. Changing TV Price” what the difference was between Monster1 and Monster2 cables. He said the difference was huge, and it would be crazy to buy the Monster1 cables. I asked him if there was a problem with buying both, and bringing the expensive cables back if I didn’t notice a difference. He said that was fine, but then something interesting happened. He started explaining that I might not notice a difference, but he definitely c