The Death Of The Best Buy Deal
So on Friday afternoon I received terrible news: the Augusta Best Buy has instituted a change in policy. They will no longer allow an individual to do more than four magazines, or one account at a time when they come in to the store. This was for Chris and me, a deathblow to so many plans we had for some incredible electronics that we would not be able to acquire any other way.
For the hell of it let me explain the "deal" for anyone who happens to read this and doesn't already know. For several years now in order to decrease lost customers due to the internet People, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Sports Illustrated have had a promotional offer in conjunction with Best Buy whereby you can sign up for any one - or all four - of these magazines for a free 8-week period at any Best Buy location. If you do not cancel within that 8-week period then you will automatically be charged for a full years worth of subscriptions. However, in January in order to add an additional incentive they started offering a 5-dollar Best Buy Gift Card also. This meant that if you sign up for all four of the magazines you, or whomever you sent the magazines to, could receive 20 dollars in Best Buy Gift Cards.
The "deal" as I put it for Chris and me is where we expanded this idea. All of the Best Buy employees tell us that most people refuse to sign up for it because they hate handing out their credit card information and having to hassle with canceling the deal or getting charged. However, back in January Chris asked the simple question of: can you sign up more than one person? At first, the Best Buy employees didn't know. They told us that you were allowed by the promotion to sign up other people, not just yourself, but that they weren't sure entirely about signing up more than one person at a time. However, when looking at the terms and conditions of the promotion, Chris and I decided to just try signing up multiple people and seeing what happened, because they assured us that we would not get in trouble at the very least.
From what we could tell, we were the first people to think of not only doing more than one person at a time, but canceling and then doing it AGAIN. You see it only takes like two weeks for a person to completely leave the system. So after those two weeks we could just go and renew the person again. Although the promotion was an eight-week promotion, the Gift Cards arrived after only 2 weeks for People, Time, and Entertainment Weekly, and four weeks for Sports Illustrated. Thus, the second the Gift Card arrived we just went online and canceled it and then renewed the account again later.
Let me explain what an "account" is. An "account" is a name/address. So Brad Hillman at 117 High St, Farmington, Me, 04938 is completely different than Brad Hillman in South Portland at my parents house. Any change in the address or name is a completely new account. So seeing this Chris and I realized the vast potential of this promotion if properly used. We began signing up ourselves to both our primary residence AND to our parents' residences, AND our parents and siblings to their residences. That equaled eight accounts at a time, which was $160 dollars in Best Buy Credit EVERY MONTH. We continued doing this at least every other month if not every month from January to August. However, in August I consulted with the associate attorney at my law firm and asked him what he thought about sending the names to addresses that weren't their primary residence. He said that legally you could send any name (as long as it was real) to any address (as long as you had their authorization) anywhere on earth and it wasn't fraudulent in any way. So, we began sending our parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and anyone else we trusted to authorize the mailing of these magazines and gift cards under their names to not only our parents houses but ours as well. Pretty soon we were getting 300-500 dollars every 2-4 weeks from Best Buy. And with that money we have bought a Wii Fit, the Rock Band Drumset, a new Netbook Laptop for Chris, a Two Terabyte External Hard Drive, several series of Blu-Ray movies, several Wii and PS3 video games, and other stuff that I can't even think of at the moment.
The sky seemed the limit and we were eyeing a new surround sound system for our living room, an E-Reader, an upconverting DVD player, and some really great Christmas presents for our relatives. That's when it all came crashing down. The Manager at the Augusta Best Buy had always been a little uncomfortable with the amount of magazine subscriptions we were doing and worried whether she was right in allowing it to continue. Apparently, after these last few weeks when we did so many, she finally caved and called her District Manager's Office to ask for instructions. They wrote back with a new policy: no more than four magazines at a time per person. FUCK. So much for our mass-scale plans for it. So much for all of the great things we wanted. Now, we still have over six hundred dollars left in gift cards at the moment and after consulting with several more attorneys and showing them the Terms and Conditions of the promotion they all agree that up until now we have not done anything illegal in their professional opinions.
So what do I do now? Well, unfortunately my options are very limited. Chris and I have been discussing it a great deal. We are not ready to just let it go, but we don't know how far to fight it. The only thing that can compel them to reverse that policy decision is to bring about legal action really, which is laughable over free Best Buy items that we were exploiting to begin with and which I have no interest in fighting THAT hard for. Another option would be to simply contact their Legal Department, ask them their opinion, and hope that maybe they would agree with me that the Terms and Conditions in their present form do not prohibit a customer from signing up more than one person at a time. However, then I would need something in writing with an official Best Buy seal or something to present to the Best Buy's I go to in order to get them to honor it. FAT CHANCE I would say. The last option Chris and I have is to just travel from Best Buy to Best Buy throughout the state doing four magazines a piece at each of the four Best Buy's that would take us through Portland and then back to Farmington. It would cost us about 20 dollars in gas, but we would make 160 in Best Buy Credit between the two of us. That would still be a good amount of money, combined with the 600 or so we already have. We could continue to get some pretty good stuff even if we had to save it up for a couple of months. But still. The point is that we used to be able to just make an easy trip to Augusta to do like 400-500 dollars no problem every 2-4 weeks. It was glorious. If the "deal" had just lasted through Christmas we would have been all set. We could have gotten the surround sound, camera, upconverting dvd player, E-reader, and Christmas presents that were the remaining expensive items that we really wanted. We plan to use our current huge amount of gift cards to buy the surround sound system, and then we'll see beyond that.
But yeah, I'll write on here perhaps some more when I speak to the Best Buy Legal Department. Also, I wanted to speak to the District Attorney's in the area to get their opinion on the legality of doing it all, even though I know I haven't done anything wrong. Peace out.
For the hell of it let me explain the "deal" for anyone who happens to read this and doesn't already know. For several years now in order to decrease lost customers due to the internet People, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Sports Illustrated have had a promotional offer in conjunction with Best Buy whereby you can sign up for any one - or all four - of these magazines for a free 8-week period at any Best Buy location. If you do not cancel within that 8-week period then you will automatically be charged for a full years worth of subscriptions. However, in January in order to add an additional incentive they started offering a 5-dollar Best Buy Gift Card also. This meant that if you sign up for all four of the magazines you, or whomever you sent the magazines to, could receive 20 dollars in Best Buy Gift Cards.
The "deal" as I put it for Chris and me is where we expanded this idea. All of the Best Buy employees tell us that most people refuse to sign up for it because they hate handing out their credit card information and having to hassle with canceling the deal or getting charged. However, back in January Chris asked the simple question of: can you sign up more than one person? At first, the Best Buy employees didn't know. They told us that you were allowed by the promotion to sign up other people, not just yourself, but that they weren't sure entirely about signing up more than one person at a time. However, when looking at the terms and conditions of the promotion, Chris and I decided to just try signing up multiple people and seeing what happened, because they assured us that we would not get in trouble at the very least.
From what we could tell, we were the first people to think of not only doing more than one person at a time, but canceling and then doing it AGAIN. You see it only takes like two weeks for a person to completely leave the system. So after those two weeks we could just go and renew the person again. Although the promotion was an eight-week promotion, the Gift Cards arrived after only 2 weeks for People, Time, and Entertainment Weekly, and four weeks for Sports Illustrated. Thus, the second the Gift Card arrived we just went online and canceled it and then renewed the account again later.
Let me explain what an "account" is. An "account" is a name/address. So Brad Hillman at 117 High St, Farmington, Me, 04938 is completely different than Brad Hillman in South Portland at my parents house. Any change in the address or name is a completely new account. So seeing this Chris and I realized the vast potential of this promotion if properly used. We began signing up ourselves to both our primary residence AND to our parents' residences, AND our parents and siblings to their residences. That equaled eight accounts at a time, which was $160 dollars in Best Buy Credit EVERY MONTH. We continued doing this at least every other month if not every month from January to August. However, in August I consulted with the associate attorney at my law firm and asked him what he thought about sending the names to addresses that weren't their primary residence. He said that legally you could send any name (as long as it was real) to any address (as long as you had their authorization) anywhere on earth and it wasn't fraudulent in any way. So, we began sending our parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and anyone else we trusted to authorize the mailing of these magazines and gift cards under their names to not only our parents houses but ours as well. Pretty soon we were getting 300-500 dollars every 2-4 weeks from Best Buy. And with that money we have bought a Wii Fit, the Rock Band Drumset, a new Netbook Laptop for Chris, a Two Terabyte External Hard Drive, several series of Blu-Ray movies, several Wii and PS3 video games, and other stuff that I can't even think of at the moment.
The sky seemed the limit and we were eyeing a new surround sound system for our living room, an E-Reader, an upconverting DVD player, and some really great Christmas presents for our relatives. That's when it all came crashing down. The Manager at the Augusta Best Buy had always been a little uncomfortable with the amount of magazine subscriptions we were doing and worried whether she was right in allowing it to continue. Apparently, after these last few weeks when we did so many, she finally caved and called her District Manager's Office to ask for instructions. They wrote back with a new policy: no more than four magazines at a time per person. FUCK. So much for our mass-scale plans for it. So much for all of the great things we wanted. Now, we still have over six hundred dollars left in gift cards at the moment and after consulting with several more attorneys and showing them the Terms and Conditions of the promotion they all agree that up until now we have not done anything illegal in their professional opinions.
So what do I do now? Well, unfortunately my options are very limited. Chris and I have been discussing it a great deal. We are not ready to just let it go, but we don't know how far to fight it. The only thing that can compel them to reverse that policy decision is to bring about legal action really, which is laughable over free Best Buy items that we were exploiting to begin with and which I have no interest in fighting THAT hard for. Another option would be to simply contact their Legal Department, ask them their opinion, and hope that maybe they would agree with me that the Terms and Conditions in their present form do not prohibit a customer from signing up more than one person at a time. However, then I would need something in writing with an official Best Buy seal or something to present to the Best Buy's I go to in order to get them to honor it. FAT CHANCE I would say. The last option Chris and I have is to just travel from Best Buy to Best Buy throughout the state doing four magazines a piece at each of the four Best Buy's that would take us through Portland and then back to Farmington. It would cost us about 20 dollars in gas, but we would make 160 in Best Buy Credit between the two of us. That would still be a good amount of money, combined with the 600 or so we already have. We could continue to get some pretty good stuff even if we had to save it up for a couple of months. But still. The point is that we used to be able to just make an easy trip to Augusta to do like 400-500 dollars no problem every 2-4 weeks. It was glorious. If the "deal" had just lasted through Christmas we would have been all set. We could have gotten the surround sound, camera, upconverting dvd player, E-reader, and Christmas presents that were the remaining expensive items that we really wanted. We plan to use our current huge amount of gift cards to buy the surround sound system, and then we'll see beyond that.
But yeah, I'll write on here perhaps some more when I speak to the Best Buy Legal Department. Also, I wanted to speak to the District Attorney's in the area to get their opinion on the legality of doing it all, even though I know I haven't done anything wrong. Peace out.