I had A+ service at best buy last month when I walked in asking for specific model. The sales rep said they were “out of stock”. I showed the website that said 2 were available for pickup. He then rolled his eyes and said they are probably in the back. He stared at me for a couple seconds before I followed up with “could I get one of those”. He was clearly annoyed that he had to go to the back but 10 minutes later he came back with the computer.
Best Buy worker here, and honestly I can attest to a lot of these problems here. Starting with customer service, at least at the time of writing, my store and many others are severely short staffed, so it can take up to 20 minutes for an individual to get help. Not surprising when you have 15+ customers and one or two sales reps in the same department. Plus if we need to walk to get product for a customer, it's almost guaranteed that someone else will stop us on the way. As for training, there is none lmao. For each department we receive very, very basic training. Think along the lines of "the cpu is the brain of the computer. Someone who does professional work may need a faster one than someone who just checks email". We don't get any training regarding any specific products or their use cases. No one gets knowledge on the different features of computers, how they are tailored to different users with different needs, how different CPUs affect performance and heat output, why the cheap plastic POS computer with a mechanical HDD and a 15 year old design isn't a good purchase just because it has an i7, etc. In my store there are really only 4 guys who are really knowledgeable on computers. One of them isn't very honest and just sells whatever makes the customer shut up, along with spending waaaaaay too much time and effor selling BestBuy services. The other guy is part time and gets very easily annoyed by customers. I'm part time as well, leaving only one full time guy and one part time guy for the whole store who actually know about computers and are willing to genuinely help. And yes, we do have a lot of pressure to sell stuff like extended warranties and our Total tech subscription. Personally, I offer it, but if the customer says no, then they said no and I won't pressure them.
I ran the computer department at BB 15-20 years ago. I transferred to a new store and on my first day I had about 10 customers waiting to yell at me. Employees were telling customers the store was out of computers that the customers could clearly see on the shelf. After some digging I learned that stores manager had told staff to walk any customer not buying an extended warranty. After fighting that for a few weeks, I quit.
Worked the sales floor for PC for 2.5 years, spent the last year currently as a Repair Agent for Geek Squad. I've pushed my team to make their revenue for custom builds. Granted, Best Buy's training is pretty minimal and for most employees, its down to what they truly know and how interested they are in this stuff. As a PC gamer and builder, I constantly push custom builds over the prebuilt systems we sell. I often joke to customers who still prefer buying a prebuilt with "sounds good, return policy is 15 days, I'll see you in 3 to exchange this for a parts list"
I feel like the employee telling them to try other stores was actually their way of saying "We don't have anything good that you can buy today in your price point." That's pretty much confirmed by them saying to buy a more expensive one and 'hope' it goes on sale, they might have checked RSS and saw something he couldn't outright say, and to order one on back-order. It seems like they tried to get the best option for you, but with your criteria it didn't work.
@@sirballs5622 Then why specify information, falsely no less? Tell them that they could try their luck elsewhere if the current stock does not satisfy them. That's all you need to say.
That tip about the return window was legit! "Hope it goes on sale" is code phrase for "I checked RSS and a couple other back end tools and this is definitely going on sale soon, but I don't want to risk my job by telling you that so I'm going to toe the line by letting you know about our price matching". I look for deals like that all the time. Usually you can get a pretty good come up if you know the sales patterns.
@@spearhead1657 did you work in inventory? There are several back end programs that give you sales window information and a few other pieces of data (RSS mainly, if I recall correctly). Also, I'm not sure if they're still sending sales brochures with COVID and all that, but those usually get to the store two weeks in advance and the inventory team sets them aside in a specific area of the warehouse. If you look at both of those, you can get a good idea of what's up. Another tip in case you didn't know about it: search Best Buy HR for "pay grade calculator" and you'll find out what they are able to pay you within your pay bracket 🙂 knowing this information is usually the difference between $17/hr and $19/hr. You can also set alerts up to notify your work email of new openings with the company specific to a pay grade/wage too. I apologize if that isn't specific enough 😅 I work in the field as a Home Theater installer now and my inventory associate skills are a little rusty. Edit: just saw you were in Geek Squad like me!
@@Anarchking_yt I did know about the pay grade calculator. When I left I was actually an ARA and making more than some of the supervisors in my store lol. I don't recall there being any sales brochures or anything like that that I know of. Im still on as seasonal, but haven't worked a shift in a couple months. The job got me started in my career. Thanks to it I have my A+ and am now a district tech at my local school district. Working on my Net+ and then Sec+ with the goal of finding something new over the summer
@@spearhead1657 that sounds pretty legit 🙂 I've used the tuition reimbursement to help cover some credits towards my psychology degree, but I'm getting to the point where it's hard to justify certain classes as being directly related to my employment 😅 I was in my store earlier today and the inventory crew showed me some PDFs of the upcoming brochures that they have access to. Not sure that I have clearance to see them on my account, but the info is definitely there.
@@Anarchking_yt wait, they have tuition reimbursement? I got a job offer at Geek Squad to be paid 16.50$/h but I'm hesitating to take the job... It's good for experience since I'm a computer engineering student but the salary is too low for me and their reputation is kinda going down.. I'm looking for jobs between 18-20$/h since minimal wage here is 15.75$... I don't know what to do, is it worth it to work for Geek Squad? Otherwise I would take a job paid 20$/h at a warehouse to make money😭😭
I worked at Best Buy for most of 2018. Reps are *barely* trained - I got lucky because im already active in this space, but my coworkers had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The only thing we were ever told is ALWAYS try to sell them the most expensive model first. It doesn't matter what they tell you they want or need, your metrics are what matters. I quit on the spot during black friday after getting yelled at for selling a budget laptop for basic word processing to a mother who stated that was *exactly* what she wanted. moral of the story, ignore every single Best Buy rep that tries to speak to you ;)
I worked at bestbuy Canada for a year and half (geeksquad) and it's crazy how different our experience can be depending on the managers, in the store I was the customer surveys (aka customer satisfaction) took priority over everything else, to the point where they'd rather we send the customers to an other store that has exactly what they need/can help them instead of selling them a service they won't be satisfied with. A good example is whenever we got an apple related issue that we didn't know how to or couldn't reasonably fix, we referred them to the only Apple certified repair store in our area instead of charging them for a mediocre job. (We can fix any Apple issue but not in-store so it cost a lot more which we feel bad about and try to prevent)
@@Jet-ij9zc yeah this is my experience working for Best Buy as well. Always some bad apples but as long as management is good there seems to be a distinct difference.
You are awesome for doing that. It's why I never buy anything tech related at these big tech stores, because for one, I know my tech fairly well and because they'll try to sell me on something I don't want or need
Weird, I wasn't trained like this at all when I worked there. In fact, we were lectured on the value of selling what's right for the company. Guess this must be an American thing
I needed a PC during the shortage last year when my PC was dying. I ended up getting a Ibuypower with a ryzen 3600, B550 board, 2060 RTX, and an SSD. I upgraded 100 into it for 2 more fans, a 980 1 tb M2, and 16 gb more of memory for a total of $1050. At the time nothing was even close to that price and even though it was a gen older video card it was going for 2/3 the price of the whole PC. They did a good job and I have been very happy.
@@p8nisman-not I got mine in November 2021. I would not have except for the laptop I had was dying. I was trying to wait it out. It's been great so far. The I paid 950 for the base but added the SSD and memory and fans on sales.
I made the mistake of wearing a blue shirt and khaki pants in best buy and was confused why people kept asking me questions. I thought they were all just friendly and I looks like I knew stuff....I think I helped more than the actual emplyees
I work right next door to a Best Buy, and while on break I went there. Our uniform is also blue. I was confused because this lady was asking me all these questions about gaming products. I helped her anyways, I didn't want to be rude.
Linus referring to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve F1 track in Montreal as "Vancouver's" might be the thing that gets him canceled after all. 'Twas a good run while it lasted lol
Best buy worker here, since amazon is taking a lot of the sales no days people think they can have their cake and eat it too. The store is not the thriving place it once was, if you need help don't expect someone to walk up to you, go to a register and ask. Not enough employees anymore to swarm you like back in the 2000s.
hey I have warranty on a prebuilt pc but no box? do you think they’ll still accept it? the box was water damaged so was thrown away. still have receipt with warranty
When I worked at best buy, we were trained to do these EXACT things. Get people credit cards, get people warranties, get people total tech support. The expected "basket" (or items we should add on to the original sale) was 10-20% of the item sale.
Absolutely true. I work there right now and it's less about basket items nowadays and simple warranties. However, we've changed a lot to where we aren't as pushy anymore.
The extended warranties offered by stores are the biggest fraud out there - The companies providing the warranties will always find excuses NOT to repair or replace - LOTS of exclusions, charges for diagnostics, deductibles, or you will end up getting a refurbished / used item or shoddy repair or a refund of heavily depreciated value. One would have to be totally clueless to deal with Best Buy, first of all Best Buy online marketplace is a cesspool of fraud sellers and scammers, and Best Buy is not doing anything about it. Best Buy's tech brand is abysmal at best, and the sales / service totally clueless in stores. Try returning an item at Best Buy the process is difficult. Lot of open boxes on shelves, used porudcts sold. They claim they identify open boxes, but not all.
Yes you are told to sell those things because those are the things that make the company money the computer doesn't make the money check your employee discount that is their Cost Plus 10%, now look at how much they pay you per hour that's not covering the cost of you selling it
@@profosist BestBuy is a crummy company and I stopped buying there a long time ago - I would definitely not work there either, they are pushing their sales people to sell GARBAGE basically and a totally deceptive warranty plan.
@@jimmydandy9364 so is Amazon a good company also somebody who's used the warranties I wouldn't say they're deceptive as long as you read what they are beforehand far better than the random square trade s*** and some sites offer
Working tech in retail is so incredibly toxic. Selling a machine without a warranty will give you a "talking to" from your manager to figure out what you did wrong with your sales pitch. Sell too many devices without a warranty and youll be moved off the sales floor onto register or other department. Most of the time when it becomes clear a customer is not interested in a warranty the sales person will try to deter you into purchasing a machine at a different store, ignore you hoping youll get fed up and leave or try to make you believe they dont have the model youre looking for/the machine you want wont meet your needs. The reason the salesman wanted her to purchase it and return it later for a better deal is because the return will come off of his sales, and as long as he isnt the one to do the repurchase next time, the repurchase wont count against him.
@Netzero Unfortunately it is the case, you’re goal as salesmen is to keep you’re efficiency ( average number of products you sell without warranty ) under 6000$ and if you have more then that you can kiss you’re job goodbye in most cases.
I remember going into PC World (our best buy kinda) and looking at the prebuilts and some guy prob a kids dad looked confused while looking all the gaming PCs and i decided to help him which resulted in an hour of helping random people to the point the manager asked if I wanted a job there kinda wish I said yes at the time but he praised me in helping the customers because he honestly said "i have no clue about computers" and said he gets anxiety and people ask him for help and tbh i understand that the average person won't know much unless they learned it themselves even the store reps.
This was me at Radioshack as a kid lol. I probably helped more people than the staff whenever I was in there and have gotten jobs from them. Amazing what happens when you hire people who actually care and don't treat them like crap...
Our local Currys PC Word store is TERRIBLE! Great if you want a TV white goods or a Mac, but I'd never ever dream of buying a PC (not even a laptop) from there.
Don't give them too much crap over the warranty upsell, their jobs literally depend on that. Part of the reason I quit Best buy is the hours I worked for directly tied into how many warranties I could hock to customers even if they didn't need it. A manager straight up told me they were sending me home early every day because I didn't sell enough warranties. Apparently I wasn't worth the near minimum wage paycheck.
That's literally just retail as someone who's worked that for many years that many different employers Best Buy is one of the better ones want some scum take a look at GameStop
I don't really understand the comparison they made in the video though. Why are they comparing the 1k custom build to a cheaper pre built? Is it pre built meant to somehow be better for less? It's weird
@@HotdogSosage Because making a video isn't about telling the truth as much as it is about shock value and entertainment to get views. Linus is also selling you something and his goal is to get the most clicks possible. You rarely get a story that is all good things because that doesn't sell well. Everybody wants something from you and they will position their product as best as they can to get that thing from you and will even be shady to do it.
@@profosist true, but they also didn't spend that much in the end. Its not apples - apples. They're directly comparing a cheaper pc. They should have mentioned that the sale was poor but then compared the similarly budgeted pc instead. The entire pc comparison section of this video is a waste of time and is almost a strawman argument
I used to work in sales at Best Buy and that “come back for the sale price” thing is almost 100% legit (I knew someone who would occasionally stretch the truth but that’s a major outlier). The point is to lock a transaction that day, while you’re in the store, but knowing an upcoming sale price is happening, they’ll easily backprice it for you. The employee gets the benefit of making a hefty sale, but doesn’t get dinged down the line (when the sale price match happens) as a refund normally would. This is often only recommended when a product-specific sale is coming up within a week or two.
Many of the other comments with their experiences working at Best Buy resonate with my experience there, too. The sales team I joined when I worked at the Computers department (before they made everyone "Sales Specialists" as opposed to being trained for specific departments) was very solid. Most of us were knowledgeable with specs, there was usually 3-5 of us scheduled at all times, and we were coordinated with managing customers. Despite that, I was not given in person training about the actual computers that we sell, but rather the credit card and services we sell. The training in the product came in the form of e-learnings, and after having to do 15-20 e-learnings in a given day, anyone would eventually just rush through it so they can get on the sales floor, thinking they'll just learn about that from our leaders. Obviously, that didn't really happen, but in our area, we were luckier to have many customers that didn't have complex needs and wouldn't need much questioning to wing it and find a product they liked. For the more complex customers, my team was knowledgeable enough over time to learn what to ask and what to recommend. Nowadays, I work at Geek Squad, and the stark difference in our sales team is unnerving. I've seen old people (65+) check in a $1600 laptop for us to setup, and we learn that they wanted us to "transfer their facebook, their emails, and their banking". I've seen $400 laptops checked in and they want us to get steam installed during the setup process and ask us if their device is "good enough to play the new COD". And most of the time, these are clients that were sold this from our sales team only minutes prior. Overall, the quality of Best Buy has degraded significantly over the years from all their downsizing, outsourcing, and focus to their online market. They cut most departments down and no longer have people dedicated to a single department. Where you would used to see 3-4 people in blue shirts at our Home Theatre, now you'd be lucky to see 1 person who's available to help you. It's been an issue for over a year, and it seems like no change is coming anytime soon. TL:DR- Don't go to Best Buy without doing your own research. Don't expect help within 5 minutes of entering a department. If you know what you want, order it for pickup. Don't get mad at the employees, they are barely more knowledgeable than you and likely spread thin.
It's been an issue since the virus when they found out they could run a whole store with 20 people and still make 80 to 90% of the revenue people cost a lot of money
@@Lexlugr Yeah it's one thing to cite price protection for people having trouble committing to a purchase in a season with a lot of intermittent sales (all of November) and another thing entirely to say roll the dice and go over budget.
Only time I've gotten a gaming prebuilt from Best Buy I ordered it from their website and picked it up at a store. I would've built my own computer but it was so much cheaper to get a prebuilt with a 3080 (or any other good GPU) at the time and was the easiest way to avoid paying scalpers.
c19 scalping price, and going for a prebuilt was a valid approach for that reason. That some places were matching / bundling some terrible products with the main desired item (gpu) is a different, but also real issue too.
Yeah, in the middle of the GPU shortage Best Buy had some great deals. I got a prebuilt with an AMD 6800 XT for less than the MSRP of all the parts combined. Since it was my first PC it was clearly the best option. Nowhere else I checked online came even close.
As a former Best Buy employee, my guess was that the salesman saved the $200 from the budget, hoping that peripherals would be bought, because that’s where the profit really comes from. I worked in the video game and home theater department back in the day, but money wasn’t made on TVs or gaming systems, it was made on all the wires, controllers, speakers, etc.
There are very few high margin PC gaming peripherals. It's mostly the cables and store brand products. I think he understood her budget to be $1k CAD not $1k US.
@@UranTCG Which being in canada is a pretty safe assumption. But this whole video is about selling outrage for eyeballs on the screen so linus can make money for views for his sponsors and youtube sponsors. This is all about selling you a product and nobody seems to understand that.
I think I’m lucky. I bought a prebuilt from Best Buy in the summer that was pretty similar to those Acer PCs with a 3060 in them. Mine looks great, performs great, and I only got it for around 1200 dollars. At the time, the gpu I got with it was going for 800, so it was the best bang for my buck at the time. I’ve had no regrets, but I also understand that my purchase was very circumstantial.
Helped a friend of mine buy a new gaming PC last year, I ended up sending her through BestBuy as well. She paid only $1100 but that was during the GPU shortage etc, honestly the build should've been priced closer to $900 but oh well. She was happy that she could play all the latest games and stream them on her Twitch lol.
@@FamousWolfe yeah it was just the cheapest option at the time. I looked into building my own since that’s what all my techie friends recommended as being cheaper, but since the gpu market was hot garbage, buying a prebuilt ended up being cheaper.
Wow. That sounds more than just "best bang for buck" sounds like big discount over manually building a system based on what's on sale and/or the best buy.
I went to Best Buy like a week ago and there were barely any staff in the store. The normal registers weren’t even open so everyone had to be checked out in customer service. Felt like a business on its death bed.
@@katser5023 I work at customer service- we're trying our best. Checking out can take a while upfront bc we do a lot of different tasks in addition to checkout. Also since we're in the "slow season" rn they've cut us down to one person to work the front of the store.
Used to be a retail supervisor at a store over here in California. Back when I was originally hired as Microsoft vendor provided labor, all entry level associates were sent out for multi day training, and bombarded with elearnings that took honestly weeks to finish. By the time my end came at Best Buy, Best Buy had cut all of those programs drastically. The off site trainings stopped, the vendors stopped getting involved providing their own supplementary training materials/swag, and due to the employee shortage, it was hard to hire people and give them time to train at all, it was necessary from Best Buy’s point of view to give them point of sale access and throw them on the sales floor ASAP. That’s why I left- as a hard working salesperson who was at the very top of the company in terms of metrics (997 stores and god knows how many employees in 2019) by 2022 being promoted to leadership I quickly realized I was not armed with the “tools” to effectively guide my team of employees. In fact, I didn’t even have a viable team of employees. They all dropped like flies like everyone else during the great resignation. As did I. My pay was great, and I was always well taken care of, but dealing with the usual retail workspace politics, unreliable workforce, and worst of all, the absolutely egregious customer base (Watched my assistant store manager get bear maced by a guy that stole all the MacBooks off the table and ran out, causing the store to close for the day and everyone in the store was coughing because it went thru the AC) made it no longer a worthy use of my time. Linus, blame upper Best Buy management for this. I promise, it’s always their fault.
From Best Buy I got a desktop with a 3080, 12700k, 1tb SSD, 32gb 3600mhz ram, 850w gold PSU, full tower, z690 wifi board, 240mm AIO. I couldn't build this on PC Parts Picker for less than $1750. Got this for $1500. Price before black Friday dropped and I went back and got a price adjustment to drop it down to $1250. Hell of a deal. Ibuypower, so large builder, but no issues and no bloat ware. Only gripe was a gen 3 SSD, but so what. Then again, I watched prices for almost a year and a half before jumping on this when it went from $2,200 to $1,500. And believe me, I take advantage of their price adjustment windows all the time. Got a Sonos arc for $200 off after it went on sale. Samsung g50 monitor got a $100 price adjustment Xm4s for $250 after an 80 drop Buy smart, and you'll be fine.
@@tamparockout17 I bought the Acer Orion 5000. It is possible to beat the 2k I paid for it, but not by very much. A week or two before I bought it, BestBuy was selling it for 1.8k. It gets really hard to beat that price. P.S. Now that the holiday price match window has closed (closed on 1/14/2023) the price has dropped to 1849.99 gahhhhhhh!!!!!!!! Edit: Upon further review, that is for the one with the 3070, I have the 3080
I work at a Best Buy right now as an experience IT guy, I did my training in the PC section and was there for about a week. I didn't sell as many warranties and memberships as they wanted and so I got moved to the registers. The guys who work in PC aren't as experienced as I am with the tech stuff and so when they have a specific question they'll come and ask me at the front, which is really funny for me. More then once I've had customers ask why the PC guys ask me for help if I'm just the front cashier, and I have to explain that I am a professionally certified technician in the IT space and that management determined that I should be working in the front instead.
I used to work at a best buy. I can promise they usually have to account for the warranty when a customer gives their estimated budget. Best buy's not actually making much on the big sales themselves if they don't sell any of that, and most of the mark-up is on stuff like cables and phone/tablet cases. I rare bothered upselling myself unless somebody specifically asked about it, its a pain in the ass to explain and not usually worth it for anybody who knows what they're doing since geek squad is another problem altogether. Another problem, at least back then, was that most of our towers and laptops would be best buy specific OEM models with barely any documentation available to know what was inside of it at a glance. It'd say like i3/5/7, the amount of ram and the hdd size and that's about it. CPU clock speed? dunno, ram specs? dunno, hdd rpm or ssd r/w speeds? dunno, GPU? dunno. Anytime I had somebody come in who really knew what they were talking about I'd just send them to a better store or offer to help build something since best buy simply did not cater to those customers at the time. My store didn't even have GPUs.
Yeah, it's the Amazon issue of oversimplifying crucial details that they assume won't matter. The listing will have something like "Storage: 1TB". Is that a hard drive, SATA SSD, NVMe? DRAM cache? TLC or QLC? Etc.
There's nothing wrong with getting a prebuild, aslong as it gives you the option to work on and swap parts in the future. There's alot of pretty decent prebuilds that just need a little more memory
Former Best Buy employee here. Best Buy in the 2010's was honestly pretty solid. Most employees were trained on a specific section of the store (I was PC so you would almost never see me in Home Theater or Appliances unless they it was an emergency and they just needed a warm body to stall with customers), the price match was good, and there were plenty of employees available. But at the end of 2019 a new CEO took over and she absolutely gutted the stores. Slashed hours, cut jobs that were important, and started pushing the services (Best Buy Card and the dreaded Total Tech Support) over the actual products that customers wanted. I left right after Covid started but things got even worse after that. So likely you got an employee who knew nothing but the basics of PC's but was the first person to wander over. It's a shame too because Best Buy was finally fully investing in PC parts and become a decent replacement for people who don't have a Microcenter near them. I built my last PC entirely from parts we sold in the store and it was a good value even without the discount.
Current BB employee. The staff cutting got worse. Around the end of summer 2022 they basically banned overtime and about halved the amount of staff here. It is a much more fast paced experience now. I’m lucky to have survived the hour cuts though
Yeah my uncle worked in the music department when they had it and was one of their best employees, until they did away with the department. He loved it and was a great employee, but the company went downhill after that and he eventually hated working there. Used to love it.
Sometimes you do get duds from Best Buy, but in my experience, I've always been recommended good computers when I present a budget. The only time I ever went for the warranty was for my Grandparents who live across the country so they can easily bring their PC in and get it serviced.
@@SunbleachedAngel People are hit or miss and no retail environment is vetting their employees that much. If you think the person you're working with doesn't know what they're doing, ask for the most knowledgeable person in the department you're shopping that works that day and tell them you're comfortable waiting for them to free up.
@@UranTCG Thank you. I think a lot of people don't work service jobs and just spout out negative things because it's easy to do that. Reality is that working retail has it's ups and downs. It's a low level economic job. You're going to get a wide variety of service, no matter if it was Best Buy or the DMV.
I have never bought a pre-built pc, my first pc was a 486-DX2-66, I was 14 years old and assembled it myself without help or internet tutorial, now it is so much easier to do it. I have since then built around 15 PC for myself. I don't understand why some people are afraid of building themselves.
iv'e built pc's myself and the thing is making a pc is way easier than it used to be and keeps getting easier, i made my first before you tube was even invented, i just learned by trial and error probably took me a few days, now there's a million for dummies tutorials on you tube and the parts are now designed for dummies to install. there's no reason to not build your own nowedays, you learn about your system and things like how it's performing and temps etc etc...
I worked in retail for staples as a tech sales supervisor. Plain and simply put, the sales rep advised to get a PC from another store because he immediately knew Maria would not buy the service plan. We called it a naked computer sale. Its better for the customer to walk out of the store with nothing than with a PC with nothing else.
Hey, a bit of feedback: while the comparison with the diy build in the same budget is useful to see how much performance you're missing out on with a certain budget, I think it'd be useful too to include a diy build of a similar price as the store-bought pc (though ideally this wouldn't be necessary when the store-bought pc is at (or at least close to) the budget). That way there is a sense of bang for the buck, as 'obviously' a 1000$ pc will be faster than an 800$ one. It would be more apples to apples.
I absolutely love that every time Linus reviews a case with no ventilation in the front, I immediately think of Linus dremmeling "speed holes" into that Gigabyte Aorus case while Jake looks on in horror... only to see the editor then add clips of it, to my delight. Keep up the fantastic work, team. We love you. :-D
As a former BBY employee: this is 100% the fault of Corrie Barry and corporate. I guarantee you the reason he was hesitant to sell, is he was worried about his membership efficiency. That’s all the company cares about these days, and salesmen get chewed out if their membership efficiency is too high, regardless of how much money they make for the store. In my last year there, I saw people turn $2000 sales to other stores, because that sale didn’t have a credit card or totaltech attached to it, and they didn’t want management yapping to them about their efficiency. In my four years, I watched the company go from encouraging people to focus on being knowledgeable salesman that focus on taking care of the customer, to chewing people out for making $10000 sales because they didn’t have a credit card attached to it
@@oglcn11 most retailers have deals with banks to offer store credit cards, in Best Buy’s case Citibank. These usually offer perks like interest free financing, and rewards points for in store purchases, and can save you money if you’re smart with them. As to why corporate cares about them… there’s two reasons: 1: banks usually give retailers kickbacks for each accepted credit card, if I remember right it’s about $200 per card 2: People that get a credit card at a store, will generally come back to buy more than people who don’t. This makes them a good metric to drive recurring revenue from repeat customers. On paper, they’re actually pretty solid, I still have my BBY card, and use it a few times a year when I need batteries, movies, or whatever. The problem is, the people in corporate can’t get it through their thick skulls that memberships and credit cards are only valuable as recurring revenue of the customers want to come back. With the way the company is now, the majority of the stores are running on skeleton crews due to constant restructuring, and the employees aren’t rewarded for being good, knowledgeable salesmen, they’re only rewarded for memberships. This has lead to a degradation of customer service, employee morale, and overall quality of the store, which kinda renders the purpose of the memberships moot.
@@thomgizziz depends on the store in that regard. Avoiding punishment is universal, but our store did have management that did care about us, so we got rewarded. Problem is, when the store management has corporate threatening their jobs at every turn, even the best managers can only do so much to shield the underlings from corporate. I survived three restructures, and the COVID layoffs that axed about a dozen managers in the four years I was there. Two were under Corrie Barry, and the other was the restructure that happened right as she was taking over from Hubert.
My mom just got me a pre-built from Best Buy. It took 2 weeks to get here and out of the box, it's really nice. I'll have to test it's overclocking and performance, but it has an i5-10400F, 16G of RAM, and a GTX 1660 Ti. Overall really good for under $1000
@SilentFeelz I couldn't post the links here but provided you are able to build it and are willing to go AMD its not hard to get a better build for less Edit: I think the list I made for my friend came out just under 800 which included a better pc a monitor and peripherals minus a keyboard because its easy to get a keyboard if you're super budget focused. Literally any working keyboard can get you started
Not really. In the event that you use the warranty Best Buy usually just issues a store credit for the price you paid for the product. But there has to be something wrong with the product, and Best Buy will attempt to repair the product before they issue a store credit for a replacement
I used to be a RadioShack store manager back in the 70's. There was no training for staff other than from the store managers who vetted and trained their staff. Back then from my experience the store managers were enthusiasts about electronics, audio or something along those lines. “We’re not looking for the guy who wants to spend his entire paycheck on a sound system”, rather RadioShack sought customers "looking to save money by buying cheaper goods and improving them through modifications and accessorizing", making it common among "nerds" and "kids aiming to excel at their science fairs" - Charles Tandy CEO RadioShack - Died 1978.
I was one of those 70s kids that made what seemed like monthly trips to Radio Shack to buy small switches and boards to make simple circuits. I think my dad and I assembled most of the parts for a Vandergraff Generator from Radio Shack for a science fair.
Thank you! I loved going to Radio Shack back then for components, connectors and so on. I still have a little plastic pouch of pre-cut solder strips that I bought in '74 or so, among other treasures.
Radio shack was the best even in the 90s when I was growing up. Was sad to see it close down. But then again, I was sad to see blockbuster close down too
While yes, that employee was a bit wrong in his approach of sale, but the reason he has recommended a much more expensive one is likely because employees have hourly goals of money that are sometimes very difficult to reach so we'll kinda throw it out there to see if it's a possibility, (not defending the rest of what he did)
As a former BestBuy employee that's been around to a toooon of different stores across the US, there are unfortunately a lot of employees in PCHO that know so little about computing(and just dont care to learn). Most of the training was computer based iirc, and occasionally we would have reps from companies like Intel,AMD, etc come to conduct mini training. That said, our store was pretty legit, but it all comes down to management. Job was super easy..just had to ask proper questions, listen to the customer and know your inventory and basics about computers.
When I was young I worked at Best Buy in the warehouse. I'd often give customers good advice and downsell them on things they didn't need to waste their money on, like $100 HDMI cables. As for the sales rep, none were techy or had any knowledge of what they were selling. Their focus was only meeting their unrealistic metrics of credit card sign-ups and warranties. Honestly, the company is poorly run, treats their employees terrible, and hopefully goes out of business. Not to mention the experience for customers was terrible and has somehow gotten worse.
You don't need a dram cache for gaming, you don't need it for most things. And the things you do need it for, you'll probably know. The most average gamer will never need a dram cache.
there's nothing wrong with buying a prebuilt PC. You just gotta know what you're buying still. I usually recommend friends and family certain prebuilds that I research for them cause I'm not going to build one for them and I'm not going to help them warranty individual parts if anything goes wrong.
This! I am so done with friends/family wanting me to build them a PC then provide unlimited tech support. I actually started recommending iPads/MacBooks for those who don’t want to play games.
Im too dumb to build one.i got confused when a friend explained the process. I ended up getting a laptop and quest two . They do everything i need with no lag so im satisfied
@@5punkybob You feel that gets you away from being the IT guy? If they can't run a windows PC with out running into problems they aren't going to have a better time on an macos PC. You might get away with an ipad because it works like a phone but if they are screwing up on one PC they are screwing up on another and you have just bought into some stupid propaganda that a mac is magically going to be easier to use and have no problems which from experience is just not true.
@@thomgizziz I'd rather they come to me then go to my uncle who "knows a guy." My uncle literally purchased a laptop that had 2 gigs of ram and an intel e processor for 700 bucks. I was not impressed. I also don't really expect store reps who are hired minimum wage and most likely are churned through a revolving door of turn over to give my relatives good advice. It's not really their fault. That's just the nature of our society and it's complete ignorance. We expect these store reps making nothing to be experts but we don't want to treat them with respect or even give them the time to become the experts we want.
Was in Best Buy this holiday season. The comment about the sales staff wait is *very* true and its a bad sign that the company is in trouble. When I went in and needed some help checking something with their inventory they put me on a _waiting list_ on an in store app they used. The store (this was around the first week of Dec.) as far as I could tell, only had 2 to 3 people on the floor for THE WHOLE STORE. There was 1 in pick up order and 1-2 at the cashiers and the 2-3 walking the floor. When your staff are *that* low in the most busiest period of the year, that is *BAD* news.
@gmu_alum08 as a publicly traded company what's most important profit Only thing that fix is that is you know a decrease in profit likely due to unhappy customers or enough people complaining (you know not employees)
Former Geek Squad here, most computing department people tend to be absolutely clueless regarding the hardware they are selling. The amount of products they sold to people that just weren't up to task is wild, I often would cut in and guide customers myself. Too many times did I see sales reps pushing crappy $200 burst sku lenovo's with Athlon dual cores and a mechanical drive, in 2021 to people needing to do photoshop. Drove me nuts.
I can give you context to this. When 2020 hit Best Buy got a new CEO and she had initiated this idea that people should treat Best Buy like Costco. Having a membership and using price protection and return. It’s so bad that when I worked there, we got yelled at for not selling enough. In fact that’s the most important things to them. The way Best Buy operates as a whole is a systematic issue.
I worked there for 3 years and a bit, I always took pride in my product knowledge (learned from way before I got hired, from just learning and researching and building PC's on my own). Best buy does barely any knowledge training besides their online "quizzes" and most employees are just using knowledge they learn on their own. I'm thankful I had good experiences working there due to the great management at my store and the staff standing up for you, and was able to give the unfiltered honest truth to the people I was helping. It's changed a lot since I left, and I heard for the worse with the new CEO taking over.
I’ve had my 2070 super and i79700f pre built for years from I buy power. It still can run the games that I like to play at max settings and can do some pretty great ray tracing. I have no regrets from buying it at Best Buy.
I worked at Best Buy in the USA in the late aughts We were not commission, but told to push old inventory before new stuff the clear space so that we didn't have to "devo" old stock back to manufacturer
That sounds like a thing your store did and not a company policy... you clearly don't know the difference and don't have the ability to understand why your anecdote is probably terrible.
@@thomgizziz Every BBY in our region had the same policy, including the east coast flagship store I worked at. This was a policy handed down by the Regional Manager for Inventory Control Tell me you know nothing about BBY ops, without saying you know nothing about BBY ops.
Yeah BB has gone downhill for sure. Bunch of people left after the pandemic on top of a lot of store closures and vastly reduced staff. Not to mention they hire seasonal people who know very little as well as people are no longer section specific. So people who use to know everything about TVs not not very the much about computers or anything else but only had to sell TVs now also have to sell all the other products in the store leading to people selling things they know nothing about. Needless to say it's a mess. I will say depending when you bought it they do have a pretty long return policy during the holidays so what he was saying about the coming back part is if the price reduces within the return exchange period you can post purchase price match unlike most places where you have to price match pre purchase. But besides that it's a mess and hard to get consistency these days. Worst of all is having people who have never dealt with mobile phones and accounts / plans are setting them up and selling them again with little to no knowledge which is a shit show as well
I work at BB right now and its rough, they kinda just send employees out to fend for themselves and we are constantly getting asked hundreds of questions. So it doesn't surprise me that an employee was redirecting or trying to push some quick alternative.
I work at Best Buy, and I'll tell you that you'll be hard pressed to find any 'experts' for sales. Sometimes you get lucky and find someone who actually knows their shit, but that's usually because they're an enthusiast, not because the store trained them. I work as a repair agent at the Geek Squad, so I typically avoid the sales floor as I'm not subjugated to outrageous sales goals. That said, even us Geek Squad agents aren't necessarily knowledgable either. It's sad, really.
At Bestbuy I recently I bought the 13700kf and rtx 4080 rig by CyberPower Pc. I recently bought it for $2629, and am happy with the purchase so far. It really saved me time and labor to build it. I like prebuilts as long as the specs are in the ball park of what I need and the components together are msrp or lower.
I've worked at Best buy, what probably happened here is the guy you got probably didn't agree with The sales quota training that they currently got. End of year, you're going to get a lot of that. So he tried to get the customer to go somewhere else, knowing that he would have to push the old stock computers instead of sell the current ones. I can't tell you how many times I ran into that. Even in geek squad and we didn't sell all that much. Way back when I was at circuit City it was even worse, if we sold a model that was current, over one that was backstock, we would not get bonus'd on that sale. Always had to push old products first.
@@TheFalseShepphard because the older stock is taking up room that they need for the new stuff which means losing $$$ , the staff is encouraged to push the older stuff like in this scenario
It also depends on the store you work at. The store I work at has never pushed back stock or anything like that. Reading a lot of the comments on here talking about how terrible the experience has been for some people working there has made me realize how good the management at my store is lol
@@TheFalseShepphard like the other guy said, old products needs to move first. It would get bonused at my stores, maybe you would get a gift card to a local diner, maybe you would get and in store gift card. Whatever. The point is though, you don't sell what the customer needs, you sell what your store needs to get out the door. I worked at two Best buys and three circuit cities, they all operated that way. Some stores don't punish you for going outside of that sales training but others do. I've seen people lose hours, be threatened with termination, lose bonuses, all four not following company policy.
I picked up this pc at Best Buy on Cyber Monday for $699. It included a Asus TUF 23.8 monitor, glass side panel, mouse and keyboard. I think at that price was a great deal.
Coming from a Best Buy employee: I agree, the warranty pitches are stupid. The membership doesn’t work for all people and the company doesn’t realize you can pick that up through social cues and instead reccomends you shove it in their face three times before you stop trying. It’s the kinda thing that made me stop working on the sales side of the place.
All say is you don't know without trying and there's probably something that you can get that might Peak their interests since the plan is so wide I remember Jay's two cents ranting about the plan but has their reading through the benefits he's like oh this is actually pretty good if you shot the best buy.
@@profosist It is almost like almost nothing is universal but people seem to be coming to the conclusion that everything they think should is universal.
Not really sure I'd call this a failure. It's the holiday shopping season and inventories are low. The fact the salesman had to "go in the back and see what he could find" kind of supports that theory. She ended up with a computer that was built for the previous year's holiday season which you described as "adequate" and at a "lower price than she would have paid if she bought the same components and paid someone to put them together". Not bad for a last-minute holiday gift. Maybe give this another try after the holidays are behind us and stores have restocked their inventories.
omg i was so worried about the $1000 build i put together because thats a decent amount to me, but then linus's build was super similar to mine which gives me tons of confidence that i did a good job picking parts!
I've talked to a few Best Buy employees (as well as my share of Fry's Electronics employees back in the day) and I think the Best Buy reps only get paid or scored by the extended warranty that they sell. I think the Fry's folks were paid on commission for the whole sale price (assuming they could get you committed to the product in their area) so getting you maxed out for your budget was right in line with their compensation as opposed to the extended warranty push that BB forces
BB employee. We get paid hourly. The only commission from BB would be a $10 gift card for getting 4 memberships in a day which is not worth it. Some employees get money from brands themselves though which I do not know much about
Wow, your office is really nice for recording, but really adds a pretty significant amount of Echo. Aura 'performance mode' can be turned off and it will still be RGB or Ambient Led lit... Sort of a misread of the tech tip there.
i am not a big fan of Best Buy but the sell rep will not care what you buy, they don't have commission and they get paid maybe a little more minimum wage
The pre-built actually came in pretty good. The days of saving a ton of money by building your own PC are long behind us. There used a be a time when you could get a lot of components free after rebate. Unless you really want something specific or want to tinker, prebuilt computers are just fine nowadays. Loving my "gaming" laptop I bought 2 years ago for Walmart Black Friday. GTX 1650, Intel i5-9300H. I upgraded the ram and storage. Got me through the pandemic for $450. At that time, you could barely buy that GPU as a standalone card for that price, due to the shortage.
honestly I think that Best Buy in this case did an excellent job, you are buying a prebuild that include labor, a share for the brand, a share for the shop and they give you an under 900$ machine that's need over 1000$ to be replicate... and it's plug&play. Obviously if you buy everything by yourself, looking for best deal around in every single component from different shops, build everything by yourself (no labor) and completely skip in some cases the shop, the last ring of the selling chain, obviously you will save money but time and effort is not even comparable. And to be honest, in few benchmark in this video we saw a 20 to 30% extra performance with.... 20% extra cost (even more considering is coming with m/k already).... I honestly think is a very good machine for the price
But if there is no clickbait how is linus going to sell his product effectively and hook people into watching his videos? Everybody has something to sell you and if you cant see and dont understand that then you are just waiting to be taken advantage of.
I'd like to see this done again, but comparing buying a laptop instore (laptops have been far more popular than desktops for an extremely long time) vs. online retailers that actually let you customise a laptop (e.g. Framework, Lenovo, PC Specialist [UK] and so on).
It would be interesting to see how Best Buy would do if thrown into the Secret Shopper gauntlet. Even more interesting would be Micro Center, a semi-regular sponsor (or at least used to be) and widely regarded as the gold standard for anything PC, especially since they sell pre-builts but can also build custom PCs.
Is it funny that someone had asked Linus when the next Secret Shopper will just TODAY on the WAN show. Lol. He said who knows it might be in the works already
Hello there, it would have been more fair to compare an $825 custom built to the Best Buy $825 price tag , with around a 20% gap between the 2 computers it is normal to expect better performance , also if you have vast knowledge on equipment and assembly and configuration you can expect a better custom built today than almost any brand of older (best buy was a 2021 computer) ready made computers.Still a good reporting of what you can expect from Best Buy but I think the same could be said for places like Walmart or Amazon and the like.Thank you and merry christmas.
Learning how to build PCs was the best thing I’ve done at home. It’s extremely overwhelming for a newcomer and I was literally sweating installing ram back like 4 years ago but I it’s so much easier now and it’s really fun
I'm literally sweating now, considering installing RAM for the first time. But i feel like the PC i got last week is the last time i'll ever buy a pre-build.
@@Sasquatch10 you can work on your prebuilt by upgrading it. Watch LTT how to build pc on TH-cam. Linus does a great job at explaining everything and it’s about an hour long but goes into everything
In 2017, Bestbuy had the same system called the GL12CP for $700 CAD It included: i5-8400 x2 4gb 2666mhz GTX 1050 2gb The case was the older version of the one in this video, except it actually had vents on the bottom of the front plate instead of a smooth face. I recently tossed a 1050 ti 4gb and two 8gb vengeance 3200mhz sticks in it although it can't overclock. Works for warzone
@@0xBlez Just check the used card market dude. I just bought a 1060 3gb a couple weeks back for the equivalent of 50 USD and saw listings for 1080 for around 200 USD. But imo the 1060 alone is more than enough for 1080p gaming. It'll easily get stable 30+ fps in all games and hit 60+ in a lot of them. Unfortunately for me, my CPU is a FX 4300 so its a huge bottleneck. Hoping to upgrade it to a 8300 or 8350 soon or if I could get it for a low enough price along with the motherboard, an i7 3770k or 4770k.
Many years ago my brother got a job as a salesman at a Toyota dealership. One of the reasons they hired him was because he knew nothing more about cars than where to put the gas in.
Yeah because working at an IT company means you are qualified to sell things. I was also angry when I worked network security forensics and then tried to be a CIA agent and they wouldn't hire me...
I work at best buy and one thing we do at my best buy is we push people away from Pre-builds, and we offer IF they get all the parts in store we will build it for them with total tech. Its a much better option then Pre-builds.
I have worked for Best Buy indirect and directly for the past 10 years. I can confidently say that the days of having employees be subject matter experts are pretty much gone. You will have one, maybe 2 employees in the stores that know a ton about computers, but generally speaking they either move to Geek Squad or they end up going to a department that will allow them to grow. Best Buy operates on what they call an ACD model: Advisor (general sales advice for every category in the store), consultant (2 levels of subject matter experts: senior consultant being the most highly trained), and designers (think system integrators or what used to be Magnolia system designers). Best Buy's operation model has changed from being a product and expert based company to being a service company that happens to sell products. For new hires, the main focus is ensuring they can offer the Total Tech yearly subscription and offer financial services through credit applications. There is no standardized training outside of electronic learnings on a computer that take about a week to complete, and the sales certification is entirely dependent on the store leaders saying they are ready to go. If you end up going into a Best Buy, ask if they have a Senior Consultant available to speak to, or make an appointment via Best Buy's website at no cost. Not only will you have the ability to skip the line entirely, but typically speaking they will have significantly more knowledge and a more personalized experience for you. These are salary + commission sales people. While they do make money for what they sell it's not a ton. The most important metric they are held accountable to is repeat business from their clients, so you'll usually have a much better experience with them. I have loved working for Best Buy over the years I've been there, and I think that the company overall is a great place for a kid to learn work as they are learning about sales, business, and other skills along the way. However if you're looking for subject matter experts, I can no longer recommend speaking to our stores reps. The company just doesn't seem to care about the training of the employees overall and it seems today they focus on doing more with less when it comes to labor and headcount.
My assumption on why they tried to send you to another store is that they could tell you weren't going to buy additional market basket items and didnt want thier numbers to look bad. I say as a former Staples employee. I know that selling the customer a computer from the website with no market basket wouldn't reflect poorly on the store so that is why they sometimes want to have you order something online.
@@___DRIP___ at staples anyway, basically anything that isn't a computer. Even stuff like pencils lol. Computers are basically sold at a loss in the hopes of making money on all the other stuff in the store.
I had an issue with BestBuy recently too, Normally when you return DOA parts its as easy as, "here is the dead one, gimmie a new one and I'll go." Unfortunately for me, they were a brand new employee and sent my bank a refund that wouldn't post till the next day and I hadn't gotten paid yet so I didn't have enough to buy a new one. They offered me NO solutions and the only reason I walked out with the part is because my friend loaned me enough to get it. I was pretty steamed that day because I explicitly told them I wanted to refund it for the same (working) part, and the fact that they wouldn't even work with me after they accidentally did the wrong thing just rubbed me the wrong way. This won't cause me to go elsewhere because in my experience it's few and far between but still an issue.
Never worked at bestbuy, but once a refund is done there’s nothing they can do. Inexperienced customer service, yeah. But there is no undo button. The word you meant to say was “exchange” not refund.
my current pc is a dell i picked up in march of 2018 from BB. it was the "best" they had in the store, because like your shopper, I 'needed it today". I can't remember what GPU it came with, but I had to replace the PSU in order to run the 1080ti I managed to barely overpay for on ebay. cut to last night when the 3080ti I won on ebay was able to just be popped in. Part of me wants to do a full monster custom build, but the sensible budgeted part of me will wait until the wheels fall off this one. I have been testing the BB people at various locations I go to though. Most of their eyes glaze over when I start saying what I'm going to be doing with the machine, but I have had actually good convos with the select few that are actually passionate about computing.
I'd be interested to know how a custom build at the same price point as the prebuilt compared, even though $1000 was your budget you didn't spend it all when at best buy so you did technically save some money...
Former Best Buy employee here. Used to work in the computer department and sold plenty of gaming machines. Everything that was said about it taking a while for people to get help and the level of help pretty much adds up when it comes to the average customer. There are lots of reasons why, if you care to understand. First, Best Buy corporate has been allotting far less positions than necessary for the past couple of years, hence the wait time. We understand that it's super frustrating to wait and we never want you to. The problem is that there are just not enough of us, ever. Especially during a rush and even more so during the holidays. You also have to factor in who comes into Best Buy: people who know next to nothing about the tech they are interested in. This is especially true of the computer department as unlike many other tech we sell, computers are ranked the highest in both need based purchases, meaning people need them, not simply wanting them, and those people often work in sectors where they are required to know little about the computers they must operate. All this adds up to the fact that we end spending an average of 20 minutes per customer interaction but it could take longer if they also require other accessories and software. These interactions are pretty much one on one so we get to you when we get to you. Nothing we can do about it. Trust me, we hate it when people take their time unintentionally causing other customers to wait. The funny thing is lots of customers walk out in rage because they claim to have waited 30 minutes for help when the store was only open for 10 (I'm not kidding, that happened so many times). Second, inventory is always in a state of flux. You have to understand that Best Buy competes with online retail like Amazon, not other big box stores (at least when it comes to computers). This means that a lot of the time, most of our good stuff that's reasonably priced or otherwise on sale will be more often available online because warehouses have a lot less overhead than the store. What's the point of having a store then? So you can talk to one of us in case you have no idea what you should get. The point is to help you figure out what's best for you, not to simply walk out with something. That's what Walmart is for. It may end up being the case that the best deal for you may be one that must be ordered online. I can tell you for a fact that no worker cares how you buy your product more so than that you buy something and personally, I always urged the customer to go with the best deal. So what if you have to wait a few days, I would say it would be worth it if you get a much better bang for your buck or if you even save a couple hundred. Also, remember that if you want something NOW, odds are other people want it too. And if something is on sale or otherwise an amazing deal, that deal is going to be snatched up real quick. We generally tend to carry only a handful of gaming rigs in stock (with the exception of the holidays where we increase our holdings) because we're not a computer store, we're a general tech store. We have to have as much variety on hand as possible. Blame Amazon for creating an economic environment where the best way to compete is have more warehouse inventory than in store. Third, yes, we do push the warranties hard. The reason for that is that there is virtually no margin on computer sales. If you want to have a viable in store experience, you have to expect that the margins will be made in this way. You have the right to say no and if the employee pushes too hard, that's wrong. Personally, I've worked with a ton of people who are clumsy, super worried, or otherwise unsure how to handle their computer long term. Those kinds of people are perfect candidates for the warranty plan because they will get good use out of it. On that note, the warranties do work. I've seen on countless occasions where we not only accepted warranty replacements NO QUESTIONS ASKED, we've even done so when they warranty wouldn't have covered it, just to be nice and give the best customer service possible. The amount of bending over backwards I've seen my managers do, especially in the face of rude customers who ended up getting exactly what the wanted is unbelievable. So sure, don't buy the warranty. As a tech channel, you guys aren't the right demographic and it wouldn't help you. But it isn't useless and the main goal is to keep customers satisfied so that they keep coming back. If they warranties burned bridges with our customer base, everyone would flee to Amazon and that's in no ones interest. I understand that I have my biases and of course, every store can vary in level of customer service, but everything I said about corporate, staffing, and inventory is indisputable. It's not a perfect system but it's one that's built to deal with Amazon which sells a ton of crap at a loss. Best Buy is the only big tech chain to have survived to this point and it was these business decisions, for better or for worse, that have allowed it to do so. Shop wherever you like, there is always going to be a downside. Such is business and such is competition. You as the consumer only benefit from having multiple avenues to choose from. P.S. I love you guys and your channel is super informative. Not saying this out of anger, simply looking to show you why these problems exist so you understand that they're not baseless.
Pre builts are a convenience.. hunting down sales for parts, inconvenience. It's also quite a bit to learn the knowledge required to know exactly what you are buying. Some people, myself included work long hours and have very limited time.
Many years ago I applied to work at Best Buy. I’m a PC enthusiast, I was going to college. They turned me down. The hiring manager told me I knew too much and wouldn’t be a good fit 😂
Knowing too much can be a legitimate thing especially if you're competing against other people that they feel are better suited for the job lots of sales people I've met that are really good aren't all that knowledgeable but dang can they sell
@@profosist sure, people who know little can sell products well. But in the case of Best Buy it is like the blind leading the blind and the customer will either be under delivered, overpay for a product, or get really bad software advice
@@classicrockonly right before the company unless there's an issue that makes them more money also it doesn't have to be blind because if you have someone who's good at selling you can make sure they have the correct info
@@profosist they may learn eventually sure. A good salesman will understand their products. I understood the products too much, and they said they didn’t want me because of that
It's true. It happened to me accidentally at BB. If you buy something on sale for say $1000 and return it after the sale ends, they will refund you the regular price, say $1100.
What? It’s the other way around. If you buy something NOT on sale and then goes on sale within 14 days (or just goes on a bigger discounted sale) they will refund the difference. Otherwise customers would just return the tv they have and buy an identical one on sale taking up more time and having to mark down the one they return as an open box.
@@UranTCG His Best Buy likes to pay customers I guess. If that really happened, the supervisor that would’ve had to approve that is no longer working for Best Buy.
as a best buy employee, we do not have very good training, but thankfully my coworkers are very good at their job but it really depends on what best buy you go to. The Johnson City TN one is actually really good compared to other ones
As someone who worked at Bestbuy during the 'rona/gpu shortage, buying a prebuilt was your best move if you were looking to get a whole new pc and not just an upgrade. You would not only save money on the sum total of the parts, but you would get some consumer protections without even buying any extra warranties, not to mention the time and hassle of building a pc yourself. Now that things are getting back to normal you could save a few bucks building again, but even then if you're buying parts at msrp you are not saving any notable amount of money.
I bought a prebuilt last year in best buy online, Cyberpower brand and so far it seems great. I never built one from scratch so it was good enough for me.
I used to work at best buy back in 2015/2016. Its was cool. Yeah its retail but wayy better than other retail places like target, walmart, office depot etc. It was a well respected place to work. It had a good trainings, employee discounts. But when I think it all went downhill when CEO Hubert Joley left best buy
Yeah,but you would have probably gotten more for less if u would have gone with a custom build. Also, often, prebuilts are power limited like the last omen one so you are getting less performance for more money
WOW! My pc was a spare from my dads office runs pretty good after 4 years as it was never used still keeps up with HD 1080p streaming! I haven’t even changed any parts yet
Same bro. I have a 9010 optiplex with a 1650 in it and a new power supply and it runs just great. I doubled its RAM to max it out and it runs like a treat.
I got a laptop from bestbuy once - open box Alienware. Never thought I’d actually pay the hefty cost for an alienware. But… it was $1000 for perfect return condition (13700HX cpu , 4070 GPU, 1TB, 16GB DDR5 RAM, RGB keyboard) I did have to do a factory reset and install all the drivers again. Since I upgraded the memory and storage to be 64GB and 5TB - everything right under $1500 total.
I will state that the hardest stipulation on the list was the instock. Constant supply chain issues and very high demand have made it very difficult to keep more budget friendly gaming pc’s on store shelves, readily available. Also, you did give two very big advantages to the custom built that easily allowed for it to be a better value. First was the aspect of being readily available. With building a PC, most people are going to need to order some part or another for the build. This luxury was not given to the store bought, as I’m sure that there were many better options that could have been available for order. The other aspect is the building of the unit. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean someone else can. A first time gaming PC buyer is probably not going to want to build their own.. or if they do it could take them days to do so. Even experienced builders, putting a PC together, installing the OS and drivers, and making sure that everything is 100% could be an all day affair. This is time and money the manufacturer spent to pre-build the PC. They could subtract $100 from the price and just send the parts, like how furniture manufacturers do now.
The Value Equation: What do you gain by paying more? And what do you lose by paying less? Don't be afraid to shop around and learn about the parts, especially the CPU. You don't have to build your own. But worth learning what is value in your area. Enjoyed this and good comparison review 👍
Last time I went to Best Buy is was devoid of any people, sales people included, I walked up to the front and asked if anybody actually works in the store, they just shrugged and said walk to the department you're browsing at and somebody will get to you. I never saw a single person thank God so I could look at new TV's without being bothered and found what I was looking for, played with it and then went home and bought it off of Amazon, got it the nest day free shipping.
I worked as a seasonal employee at Best Buy back in 2016. Although there was no commission, there were weekly/monthly sales goals. Our training consisted of "Always be upselling." I got written up once because I didn't attempt to convince an elderly lady to buy a laptop that was x3 her budget.
Former best buy worker here, you are lucky these days to find a trained sales associate that knows about gaming, the days of super trained associates is over and the reason they told you to go to another store is bc half the time they are out of stock on gaming pc's in store, and the total tech warranty is all the stores care about on top of short staffed stores
On another note I think you should have went to multiple Best Buy’s and compared the suggestions and customer service. Because it probably is hit or miss depending on where you’re at.
But that wouldn't make for good click bait. What you are failing to realize is that linus is selling you something as much as best buy is, probably even more, and his team knows how to sell a story to you and a story that says everything was great doesn't sell. You are literally telling him to do something that is bad for his business.
I had amazing service when I went to get a prebuilt and a monitor a few days ago. We weren't looking for a specific model but the worker there was extremely helpful!
I had A+ service at best buy last month when I walked in asking for specific model. The sales rep said they were “out of stock”. I showed the website that said 2 were available for pickup. He then rolled his eyes and said they are probably in the back. He stared at me for a couple seconds before I followed up with “could I get one of those”. He was clearly annoyed that he had to go to the back but 10 minutes later he came back with the computer.
stuff like that is why I would never go anywhere other than microcenter for physical computer stuff purchases
A+ for lack of effort
100% sure that the deal was that good that someone was probably hiding them for themselves...
“A+ service after having to ask the guy to do his job and he reluctantly did so”
lmao, that's just so brilliant
Best Buy worker here, and honestly I can attest to a lot of these problems here. Starting with customer service, at least at the time of writing, my store and many others are severely short staffed, so it can take up to 20 minutes for an individual to get help. Not surprising when you have 15+ customers and one or two sales reps in the same department. Plus if we need to walk to get product for a customer, it's almost guaranteed that someone else will stop us on the way.
As for training, there is none lmao. For each department we receive very, very basic training. Think along the lines of "the cpu is the brain of the computer. Someone who does professional work may need a faster one than someone who just checks email". We don't get any training regarding any specific products or their use cases. No one gets knowledge on the different features of computers, how they are tailored to different users with different needs, how different CPUs affect performance and heat output, why the cheap plastic POS computer with a mechanical HDD and a 15 year old design isn't a good purchase just because it has an i7, etc.
In my store there are really only 4 guys who are really knowledgeable on computers. One of them isn't very honest and just sells whatever makes the customer shut up, along with spending waaaaaay too much time and effor selling BestBuy services. The other guy is part time and gets very easily annoyed by customers. I'm part time as well, leaving only one full time guy and one part time guy for the whole store who actually know about computers and are willing to genuinely help.
And yes, we do have a lot of pressure to sell stuff like extended warranties and our Total tech subscription. Personally, I offer it, but if the customer says no, then they said no and I won't pressure them.
I ran the computer department at BB 15-20 years ago. I transferred to a new store and on my first day I had about 10 customers waiting to yell at me. Employees were telling customers the store was out of computers that the customers could clearly see on the shelf. After some digging I learned that stores manager had told staff to walk any customer not buying an extended warranty. After fighting that for a few weeks, I quit.
Someone isn’t doing their e-learnings lol
@@LLIMITthere is no incentive to do the e-learnings when you won’t get paid for doing them or receive a promotion
Still No excuse to not recommend the “Best” for the customer.
Worked the sales floor for PC for 2.5 years, spent the last year currently as a Repair Agent for Geek Squad. I've pushed my team to make their revenue for custom builds. Granted, Best Buy's training is pretty minimal and for most employees, its down to what they truly know and how interested they are in this stuff. As a PC gamer and builder, I constantly push custom builds over the prebuilt systems we sell. I often joke to customers who still prefer buying a prebuilt with "sounds good, return policy is 15 days, I'll see you in 3 to exchange this for a parts list"
I feel like the employee telling them to try other stores was actually their way of saying "We don't have anything good that you can buy today in your price point." That's pretty much confirmed by them saying to buy a more expensive one and 'hope' it goes on sale, they might have checked RSS and saw something he couldn't outright say, and to order one on back-order. It seems like they tried to get the best option for you, but with your criteria it didn't work.
I can't believe they said that. They seemed to have better options, and one of the recommendations didn't even have PCs for sale apparently.
@@sirballs5622 Then why specify information, falsely no less?
Tell them that they could try their luck elsewhere if the current stock does not satisfy them. That's all you need to say.
That tip about the return window was legit! "Hope it goes on sale" is code phrase for "I checked RSS and a couple other back end tools and this is definitely going on sale soon, but I don't want to risk my job by telling you that so I'm going to toe the line by letting you know about our price matching".
I look for deals like that all the time. Usually you can get a pretty good come up if you know the sales patterns.
I worked at Best Buy (Geek Squad) for 2 years and have never heard anything about being able to see future sales. Can you actually do that?
@@spearhead1657 did you work in inventory? There are several back end programs that give you sales window information and a few other pieces of data (RSS mainly, if I recall correctly). Also, I'm not sure if they're still sending sales brochures with COVID and all that, but those usually get to the store two weeks in advance and the inventory team sets them aside in a specific area of the warehouse. If you look at both of those, you can get a good idea of what's up.
Another tip in case you didn't know about it: search Best Buy HR for "pay grade calculator" and you'll find out what they are able to pay you within your pay bracket 🙂 knowing this information is usually the difference between $17/hr and $19/hr. You can also set alerts up to notify your work email of new openings with the company specific to a pay grade/wage too.
I apologize if that isn't specific enough 😅 I work in the field as a Home Theater installer now and my inventory associate skills are a little rusty.
Edit: just saw you were in Geek Squad like me!
@@Anarchking_yt I did know about the pay grade calculator. When I left I was actually an ARA and making more than some of the supervisors in my store lol. I don't recall there being any sales brochures or anything like that that I know of.
Im still on as seasonal, but haven't worked a shift in a couple months. The job got me started in my career. Thanks to it I have my A+ and am now a district tech at my local school district. Working on my Net+ and then Sec+ with the goal of finding something new over the summer
@@spearhead1657 that sounds pretty legit 🙂 I've used the tuition reimbursement to help cover some credits towards my psychology degree, but I'm getting to the point where it's hard to justify certain classes as being directly related to my employment 😅 I was in my store earlier today and the inventory crew showed me some PDFs of the upcoming brochures that they have access to. Not sure that I have clearance to see them on my account, but the info is definitely there.
@@Anarchking_yt wait, they have tuition reimbursement? I got a job offer at Geek Squad to be paid 16.50$/h but I'm hesitating to take the job... It's good for experience since I'm a computer engineering student but the salary is too low for me and their reputation is kinda going down.. I'm looking for jobs between 18-20$/h since minimal wage here is 15.75$... I don't know what to do, is it worth it to work for Geek Squad? Otherwise I would take a job paid 20$/h at a warehouse to make money😭😭
I worked at Best Buy for most of 2018. Reps are *barely* trained - I got lucky because im already active in this space, but my coworkers had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The only thing we were ever told is ALWAYS try to sell them the most expensive model first. It doesn't matter what they tell you they want or need, your metrics are what matters. I quit on the spot during black friday after getting yelled at for selling a budget laptop for basic word processing to a mother who stated that was *exactly* what she wanted.
moral of the story, ignore every single Best Buy rep that tries to speak to you ;)
you a real one for that , cheers
I worked at bestbuy Canada for a year and half (geeksquad) and it's crazy how different our experience can be depending on the managers, in the store I was the customer surveys (aka customer satisfaction) took priority over everything else, to the point where they'd rather we send the customers to an other store that has exactly what they need/can help them instead of selling them a service they won't be satisfied with.
A good example is whenever we got an apple related issue that we didn't know how to or couldn't reasonably fix, we referred them to the only Apple certified repair store in our area instead of charging them for a mediocre job. (We can fix any Apple issue but not in-store so it cost a lot more which we feel bad about and try to prevent)
@@Jet-ij9zc yeah this is my experience working for Best Buy as well. Always some bad apples but as long as management is good there seems to be a distinct difference.
You are awesome for doing that. It's why I never buy anything tech related at these big tech stores, because for one, I know my tech fairly well and because they'll try to sell me on something I don't want or need
Weird, I wasn't trained like this at all when I worked there. In fact, we were lectured on the value of selling what's right for the company. Guess this must be an American thing
I needed a PC during the shortage last year when my PC was dying. I ended up getting a Ibuypower with a ryzen 3600, B550 board, 2060 RTX, and an SSD. I upgraded 100 into it for 2 more fans, a 980 1 tb M2, and 16 gb more of memory for a total of $1050. At the time nothing was even close to that price and even though it was a gen older video card it was going for 2/3 the price of the whole PC. They did a good job and I have been very happy.
Dual GPUs?
I got a similar set up on marketplace in march for $750
@@2oqh Oops brain did not work. Fixed!
@@p8nisman-not I got mine in November 2021. I would not have except for the laptop I had was dying. I was trying to wait it out. It's been great so far. The I paid 950 for the base but added the SSD and memory and fans on sales.
@@cheetahfurry9107 There was a similar build with a 2060 RTX GPU for sale for 749€ in the first half of 2021.
But yes, the GPU shortage was a bitch.
I made the mistake of wearing a blue shirt and khaki pants in best buy and was confused why people kept asking me questions. I thought they were all just friendly and I looks like I knew stuff....I think I helped more than the actual emplyees
I work right next door to a Best Buy, and while on break I went there. Our uniform is also blue. I was confused because this lady was asking me all these questions about gaming products. I helped her anyways, I didn't want to be rude.
You'll run into the same problem if you wear a red shit with khakis in Target. 😋
This reminds me of the Improv Everywhere Best Buy prank.
Remembers me of that one time I entered IKEA in a yellow shirt.
You think highly of yourself and are probably wrong... you'd usually be less helpful.
Linus referring to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve F1 track in Montreal as "Vancouver's" might be the thing that gets him canceled after all. 'Twas a good run while it lasted lol
While that might be what is displayed on the screen behind him, it doesn't mean that this is what was run for the benchmark itself.
@@TetraSky There isn't a "Vancouver" track in F1 22... There's a Canadian GP track, which is Montreal.
It's Joever.
Came here just for this lmao
look who wrote for this video... possibly a probation writer.. but the most shocking thing is this video passed QC by the QC person. 👍
Best buy worker here, since amazon is taking a lot of the sales no days people think they can have their cake and eat it too. The store is not the thriving place it once was, if you need help don't expect someone to walk up to you, go to a register and ask. Not enough employees anymore to swarm you like back in the 2000s.
hey I have warranty on a prebuilt pc but no box? do you think they’ll still accept it? the box was water damaged so was thrown away. still have receipt with warranty
When I worked at best buy, we were trained to do these EXACT things. Get people credit cards, get people warranties, get people total tech support. The expected "basket" (or items we should add on to the original sale) was 10-20% of the item sale.
Absolutely true. I work there right now and it's less about basket items nowadays and simple warranties. However, we've changed a lot to where we aren't as pushy anymore.
The extended warranties offered by stores are the biggest fraud out there - The companies providing the warranties will always find excuses NOT to repair or replace - LOTS of exclusions, charges for diagnostics, deductibles, or you will end up getting a refurbished / used item or shoddy repair or a refund of heavily depreciated value. One would have to be totally clueless to deal with Best Buy, first of all Best Buy online marketplace is a cesspool of fraud sellers and scammers, and Best Buy is not doing anything about it. Best Buy's tech brand is abysmal at best, and the sales / service totally clueless in stores. Try returning an item at Best Buy the process is difficult. Lot of open boxes on shelves, used porudcts sold. They claim they identify open boxes, but not all.
Yes you are told to sell those things because those are the things that make the company money the computer doesn't make the money check your employee discount that is their Cost Plus 10%, now look at how much they pay you per hour that's not covering the cost of you selling it
@@profosist BestBuy is a crummy company and I stopped buying there a long time ago - I would definitely not work there either, they are pushing their sales people to sell GARBAGE basically and a totally deceptive warranty plan.
@@jimmydandy9364 so is Amazon a good company also somebody who's used the warranties I wouldn't say they're deceptive as long as you read what they are beforehand far better than the random square trade s*** and some sites offer
Working tech in retail is so incredibly toxic. Selling a machine without a warranty will give you a "talking to" from your manager to figure out what you did wrong with your sales pitch. Sell too many devices without a warranty and youll be moved off the sales floor onto register or other department.
Most of the time when it becomes clear a customer is not interested in a warranty the sales person will try to deter you into purchasing a machine at a different store, ignore you hoping youll get fed up and leave or try to make you believe they dont have the model youre looking for/the machine you want wont meet your needs.
The reason the salesman wanted her to purchase it and return it later for a better deal is because the return will come off of his sales, and as long as he isnt the one to do the repurchase next time, the repurchase wont count against him.
As a Bestbuy employee this is 100% true
Haven't had this issue at may store, we don't really care about warranties at all and just care about credit cards
This is why I changed to library IT.
@Netzero except that's not how corporate metrics are used. The manager is the one who's going to get yelled at if he didn't sell enough warranties.
@Netzero Unfortunately it is the case, you’re goal as salesmen is to keep you’re efficiency ( average number of products you sell without warranty ) under 6000$ and if you have more then that you can kiss you’re job goodbye in most cases.
I remember going into PC World (our best buy kinda) and looking at the prebuilts and some guy prob a kids dad looked confused while looking all the gaming PCs and i decided to help him which resulted in an hour of helping random people to the point the manager asked if I wanted a job there kinda wish I said yes at the time but he praised me in helping the customers because he honestly said "i have no clue about computers" and said he gets anxiety and people ask him for help and tbh i understand that the average person won't know much unless they learned it themselves even the store reps.
And then everybody clapped...
Dude you probably could've negotiated a better wage as well, being the resident tech expert etc. Ah well, hindsight is 20/20 as they say.
This was me at Radioshack as a kid lol. I probably helped more people than the staff whenever I was in there and have gotten jobs from them. Amazing what happens when you hire people who actually care and don't treat them like crap...
Our local Currys PC Word store is TERRIBLE! Great if you want a TV white goods or a Mac, but I'd never ever dream of buying a PC (not even a laptop) from there.
r/thathappened
Don't give them too much crap over the warranty upsell, their jobs literally depend on that. Part of the reason I quit Best buy is the hours I worked for directly tied into how many warranties I could hock to customers even if they didn't need it. A manager straight up told me they were sending me home early every day because I didn't sell enough warranties. Apparently I wasn't worth the near minimum wage paycheck.
That sucks dude good thing I didn't apply there.
My god, retail workers get the worst huh.
@@arandomcommenter412 Well, they have competition for first place in that department, but they're definitely in the running for it, yeah.
Ex BBY employee here and I love that you are calling them out. A lot of their tactics are only questionable but secretly really shady.
That's literally just retail as someone who's worked that for many years that many different employers Best Buy is one of the better ones want some scum take a look at GameStop
I don't really understand the comparison they made in the video though. Why are they comparing the 1k custom build to a cheaper pre built? Is it pre built meant to somehow be better for less? It's weird
@@HotdogSosage Because making a video isn't about telling the truth as much as it is about shock value and entertainment to get views. Linus is also selling you something and his goal is to get the most clicks possible. You rarely get a story that is all good things because that doesn't sell well. Everybody wants something from you and they will position their product as best as they can to get that thing from you and will even be shady to do it.
@@HotdogSosage the person selling them the system did not take full advantage of their budget
@@profosist true, but they also didn't spend that much in the end. Its not apples - apples. They're directly comparing a cheaper pc. They should have mentioned that the sale was poor but then compared the similarly budgeted pc instead. The entire pc comparison section of this video is a waste of time and is almost a strawman argument
I used to work in sales at Best Buy and that “come back for the sale price” thing is almost 100% legit (I knew someone who would occasionally stretch the truth but that’s a major outlier). The point is to lock a transaction that day, while you’re in the store, but knowing an upcoming sale price is happening, they’ll easily backprice it for you. The employee gets the benefit of making a hefty sale, but doesn’t get dinged down the line (when the sale price match happens) as a refund normally would. This is often only recommended when a product-specific sale is coming up within a week or two.
How long do you have after you buy it?
@@matthew3948 depends on the return window/sale window.
Many of the other comments with their experiences working at Best Buy resonate with my experience there, too. The sales team I joined when I worked at the Computers department (before they made everyone "Sales Specialists" as opposed to being trained for specific departments) was very solid. Most of us were knowledgeable with specs, there was usually 3-5 of us scheduled at all times, and we were coordinated with managing customers. Despite that, I was not given in person training about the actual computers that we sell, but rather the credit card and services we sell.
The training in the product came in the form of e-learnings, and after having to do 15-20 e-learnings in a given day, anyone would eventually just rush through it so they can get on the sales floor, thinking they'll just learn about that from our leaders. Obviously, that didn't really happen, but in our area, we were luckier to have many customers that didn't have complex needs and wouldn't need much questioning to wing it and find a product they liked. For the more complex customers, my team was knowledgeable enough over time to learn what to ask and what to recommend.
Nowadays, I work at Geek Squad, and the stark difference in our sales team is unnerving. I've seen old people (65+) check in a $1600 laptop for us to setup, and we learn that they wanted us to "transfer their facebook, their emails, and their banking". I've seen $400 laptops checked in and they want us to get steam installed during the setup process and ask us if their device is "good enough to play the new COD". And most of the time, these are clients that were sold this from our sales team only minutes prior.
Overall, the quality of Best Buy has degraded significantly over the years from all their downsizing, outsourcing, and focus to their online market. They cut most departments down and no longer have people dedicated to a single department. Where you would used to see 3-4 people in blue shirts at our Home Theatre, now you'd be lucky to see 1 person who's available to help you. It's been an issue for over a year, and it seems like no change is coming anytime soon.
TL:DR- Don't go to Best Buy without doing your own research. Don't expect help within 5 minutes of entering a department. If you know what you want, order it for pickup. Don't get mad at the employees, they are barely more knowledgeable than you and likely spread thin.
It's been an issue since the virus when they found out they could run a whole store with 20 people and still make 80 to 90% of the revenue people cost a lot of money
How much u get paid at geek squad
@@tweeze123 I'm in PA, I am currently at $17.50 an hour
The price protection thing is legit. Got a partial refund of about $330 from a laptop that went on sale a week later.
Except there's literally no guarantee that it is going to drop in price. Most people don't deal in luck when it comes to their money.
I think the weird issue is relying on it as if the price drop would be a sure thing, not necessarily the salesman bringing it up
credit cards have free price protection
@@Lexlugr Yeah it's one thing to cite price protection for people having trouble committing to a purchase in a season with a lot of intermittent sales (all of November) and another thing entirely to say roll the dice and go over budget.
@@Lexlugr Working there. if the price dropped during black friday. It's 100% dropping during boxing day. Might be that
Turns out spending almost 20% more gets you a better PC.
Only time I've gotten a gaming prebuilt from Best Buy I ordered it from their website and picked it up at a store. I would've built my own computer but it was so much cheaper to get a prebuilt with a 3080 (or any other good GPU) at the time and was the easiest way to avoid paying scalpers.
Yup same here
Same
c19 scalping price, and going for a prebuilt was a valid approach for that reason. That some places were matching / bundling some terrible products with the main desired item (gpu) is a different, but also real issue too.
Yeah, in the middle of the GPU shortage Best Buy had some great deals. I got a prebuilt with an AMD 6800 XT for less than the MSRP of all the parts combined. Since it was my first PC it was clearly the best option. Nowhere else I checked online came even close.
Same. Except mine was from Dell. Had to pick up new coolers and fans but it ended up being alright for how often I play games
As a former Best Buy employee, my guess was that the salesman saved the $200 from the budget, hoping that peripherals would be bought, because that’s where the profit really comes from. I worked in the video game and home theater department back in the day, but money wasn’t made on TVs or gaming systems, it was made on all the wires, controllers, speakers, etc.
There are very few high margin PC gaming peripherals. It's mostly the cables and store brand products. I think he understood her budget to be $1k CAD not $1k US.
@@UranTCG Which being in canada is a pretty safe assumption. But this whole video is about selling outrage for eyeballs on the screen so linus can make money for views for his sponsors and youtube sponsors. This is all about selling you a product and nobody seems to understand that.
I think I’m lucky. I bought a prebuilt from Best Buy in the summer that was pretty similar to those Acer PCs with a 3060 in them. Mine looks great, performs great, and I only got it for around 1200 dollars. At the time, the gpu I got with it was going for 800, so it was the best bang for my buck at the time. I’ve had no regrets, but I also understand that my purchase was very circumstantial.
And so was the one linus did...
Helped a friend of mine buy a new gaming PC last year, I ended up sending her through BestBuy as well. She paid only $1100 but that was during the GPU shortage etc, honestly the build should've been priced closer to $900 but oh well. She was happy that she could play all the latest games and stream them on her Twitch lol.
@@FamousWolfe yeah it was just the cheapest option at the time. I looked into building my own since that’s what all my techie friends recommended as being cheaper, but since the gpu market was hot garbage, buying a prebuilt ended up being cheaper.
Wow. That sounds more than just "best bang for buck" sounds like big discount over manually building a system based on what's on sale and/or the best buy.
@@MsHojat yeah 100%. It just worked out pretty magically
I went to Best Buy like a week ago and there were barely any staff in the store. The normal registers weren’t even open so everyone had to be checked out in customer service. Felt like a business on its death bed.
Lots of stores got rid of “customer service” and it’s all just at checkout now
Kind of hate going to my best buy too for that reason. Takes forever for you to check out now.
@@katser5023 I work at customer service- we're trying our best. Checking out can take a while upfront bc we do a lot of different tasks in addition to checkout. Also since we're in the "slow season" rn they've cut us down to one person to work the front of the store.
It's not the deathbed, its just another January atleast when you left the comment.
Not even close to its death bed lmao, hundreds of people
Used to be a retail supervisor at a store over here in California. Back when I was originally hired as Microsoft vendor provided labor, all entry level associates were sent out for multi day training, and bombarded with elearnings that took honestly weeks to finish. By the time my end came at Best Buy, Best Buy had cut all of those programs drastically. The off site trainings stopped, the vendors stopped getting involved providing their own supplementary training materials/swag, and due to the employee shortage, it was hard to hire people and give them time to train at all, it was necessary from Best Buy’s point of view to give them point of sale access and throw them on the sales floor ASAP. That’s why I left- as a hard working salesperson who was at the very top of the company in terms of metrics (997 stores and god knows how many employees in 2019) by 2022 being promoted to leadership I quickly realized I was not armed with the “tools” to effectively guide my team of employees. In fact, I didn’t even have a viable team of employees. They all dropped like flies like everyone else during the great resignation. As did I. My pay was great, and I was always well taken care of, but dealing with the usual retail workspace politics, unreliable workforce, and worst of all, the absolutely egregious customer base (Watched my assistant store manager get bear maced by a guy that stole all the MacBooks off the table and ran out, causing the store to close for the day and everyone in the store was coughing because it went thru the AC) made it no longer a worthy use of my time. Linus, blame upper Best Buy management for this. I promise, it’s always their fault.
Literally always upper Management's fault they may step foot in a store every once in awhile but that's about it
The odd thing is that, I have bought items from Best Buy and and the next week the price went even lower.
From Best Buy I got a desktop with a 3080, 12700k, 1tb SSD, 32gb 3600mhz ram, 850w gold PSU, full tower, z690 wifi board, 240mm AIO. I couldn't build this on PC Parts Picker for less than $1750.
Got this for $1500. Price before black Friday dropped and I went back and got a price adjustment to drop it down to $1250.
Hell of a deal. Ibuypower, so large builder, but no issues and no bloat ware. Only gripe was a gen 3 SSD, but so what.
Then again, I watched prices for almost a year and a half before jumping on this when it went from $2,200 to $1,500. And believe me, I take advantage of their price adjustment windows all the time.
Got a Sonos arc for $200 off after it went on sale.
Samsung g50 monitor got a $100 price adjustment
Xm4s for $250 after an 80 drop
Buy smart, and you'll be fine.
Electronics get cheaper at a fairly rapid rate relative to other consumer goods
You can always go back an show them the price drop. They should be able to match within 2weeks (return period)
Same
@@tamparockout17 I bought the Acer Orion 5000. It is possible to beat the 2k I paid for it, but not by very much. A week or two before I bought it, BestBuy was selling it for 1.8k. It gets really hard to beat that price.
P.S. Now that the holiday price match window has closed (closed on 1/14/2023) the price has dropped to 1849.99 gahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!
Edit: Upon further review, that is for the one with the 3070, I have the 3080
I work at a Best Buy right now as an experience IT guy, I did my training in the PC section and was there for about a week. I didn't sell as many warranties and memberships as they wanted and so I got moved to the registers. The guys who work in PC aren't as experienced as I am with the tech stuff and so when they have a specific question they'll come and ask me at the front, which is really funny for me. More then once I've had customers ask why the PC guys ask me for help if I'm just the front cashier, and I have to explain that I am a professionally certified technician in the IT space and that management determined that I should be working in the front instead.
This is so dumb, Best buy needs a new CEO like now.
@@SqueakGames quit and go where you are valued sir
I used to work at a best buy. I can promise they usually have to account for the warranty when a customer gives their estimated budget. Best buy's not actually making much on the big sales themselves if they don't sell any of that, and most of the mark-up is on stuff like cables and phone/tablet cases. I rare bothered upselling myself unless somebody specifically asked about it, its a pain in the ass to explain and not usually worth it for anybody who knows what they're doing since geek squad is another problem altogether. Another problem, at least back then, was that most of our towers and laptops would be best buy specific OEM models with barely any documentation available to know what was inside of it at a glance. It'd say like i3/5/7, the amount of ram and the hdd size and that's about it. CPU clock speed? dunno, ram specs? dunno, hdd rpm or ssd r/w speeds? dunno, GPU? dunno.
Anytime I had somebody come in who really knew what they were talking about I'd just send them to a better store or offer to help build something since best buy simply did not cater to those customers at the time. My store didn't even have GPUs.
Yeah, it's the Amazon issue of oversimplifying crucial details that they assume won't matter.
The listing will have something like "Storage: 1TB". Is that a hard drive, SATA SSD, NVMe? DRAM cache? TLC or QLC? Etc.
LOL im the 70th like i just cant be 69
Its the same approach at Staples where they make more off the services and addons over the machine
@@Finnedquill6918 this is so accurate. I work at staples and the other day a ~300 laptop sold for almost $600 once the support bundle was added on...
You guys didn't have MRI?
There's nothing wrong with getting a prebuild, aslong as it gives you the option to work on and swap parts in the future. There's alot of pretty decent prebuilds that just need a little more memory
Former Best Buy employee here. Best Buy in the 2010's was honestly pretty solid. Most employees were trained on a specific section of the store (I was PC so you would almost never see me in Home Theater or Appliances unless they it was an emergency and they just needed a warm body to stall with customers), the price match was good, and there were plenty of employees available. But at the end of 2019 a new CEO took over and she absolutely gutted the stores. Slashed hours, cut jobs that were important, and started pushing the services (Best Buy Card and the dreaded Total Tech Support) over the actual products that customers wanted. I left right after Covid started but things got even worse after that. So likely you got an employee who knew nothing but the basics of PC's but was the first person to wander over.
It's a shame too because Best Buy was finally fully investing in PC parts and become a decent replacement for people who don't have a Microcenter near them. I built my last PC entirely from parts we sold in the store and it was a good value even without the discount.
Current BB employee. The staff cutting got worse. Around the end of summer 2022 they basically banned overtime and about halved the amount of staff here. It is a much more fast paced experience now. I’m lucky to have survived the hour cuts though
Yeah my uncle worked in the music department when they had it and was one of their best employees, until they did away with the department. He loved it and was a great employee, but the company went downhill after that and he eventually hated working there. Used to love it.
Sometimes you do get duds from Best Buy, but in my experience, I've always been recommended good computers when I present a budget. The only time I ever went for the warranty was for my Grandparents who live across the country so they can easily bring their PC in and get it serviced.
sounds like they are very hit or miss, which isn't a good thing
@@SunbleachedAngel People are hit or miss and no retail environment is vetting their employees that much. If you think the person you're working with doesn't know what they're doing, ask for the most knowledgeable person in the department you're shopping that works that day and tell them you're comfortable waiting for them to free up.
@@UranTCG Thank you. I think a lot of people don't work service jobs and just spout out negative things because it's easy to do that. Reality is that working retail has it's ups and downs. It's a low level economic job. You're going to get a wide variety of service, no matter if it was Best Buy or the DMV.
@@SinStarfire they do. I have bought from them in the past, and I have used their services.
@@SinStarfire Insults and misinfo, cool cool. Plan on contributing anything useful to the convo?
I have never bought a pre-built pc, my first pc was a 486-DX2-66, I was 14 years old and assembled it myself without help or internet tutorial, now it is so much easier to do it. I have since then built around 15 PC for myself. I don't understand why some people are afraid of building themselves.
iv'e built pc's myself and the thing is making a pc is way easier than it used to be and keeps getting easier, i made my first before you tube was even invented, i just learned by trial and error probably took me a few days, now there's a million for dummies tutorials on you tube and the parts are now designed for dummies to install.
there's no reason to not build your own nowedays, you learn about your system and things like how it's performing and temps etc etc...
I worked in retail for staples as a tech sales supervisor. Plain and simply put, the sales rep advised to get a PC from another store because he immediately knew Maria would not buy the service plan. We called it a naked computer sale. Its better for the customer to walk out of the store with nothing than with a PC with nothing else.
That’s ridiculous
@@jumbomuffin1316 Margins are super thin, if there's any margin. It's often time sold at lost or close to it. Services and add-ons pays.
Hey, a bit of feedback: while the comparison with the diy build in the same budget is useful to see how much performance you're missing out on with a certain budget, I think it'd be useful too to include a diy build of a similar price as the store-bought pc (though ideally this wouldn't be necessary when the store-bought pc is at (or at least close to) the budget). That way there is a sense of bang for the buck, as 'obviously' a 1000$ pc will be faster than an 800$ one. It would be more apples to apples.
i got the same pc brand new for 583 dollers
I absolutely love that every time Linus reviews a case with no ventilation in the front, I immediately think of Linus dremmeling "speed holes" into that Gigabyte Aorus case while Jake looks on in horror... only to see the editor then add clips of it, to my delight. Keep up the fantastic work, team. We love you. :-D
As a former BBY employee: this is 100% the fault of Corrie Barry and corporate. I guarantee you the reason he was hesitant to sell, is he was worried about his membership efficiency. That’s all the company cares about these days, and salesmen get chewed out if their membership efficiency is too high, regardless of how much money they make for the store.
In my last year there, I saw people turn $2000 sales to other stores, because that sale didn’t have a credit card or totaltech attached to it, and they didn’t want management yapping to them about their efficiency.
In my four years, I watched the company go from encouraging people to focus on being knowledgeable salesman that focus on taking care of the customer, to chewing people out for making $10000 sales because they didn’t have a credit card attached to it
What? Best Buy gives credit card? How does that work exactly? Asking as a non-US person
@@oglcn11 most retailers have deals with banks to offer store credit cards, in Best Buy’s case Citibank. These usually offer perks like interest free financing, and rewards points for in store purchases, and can save you money if you’re smart with them.
As to why corporate cares about them… there’s two reasons:
1: banks usually give retailers kickbacks for each accepted credit card, if I remember right it’s about $200 per card
2: People that get a credit card at a store, will generally come back to buy more than people who don’t. This makes them a good metric to drive recurring revenue from repeat customers.
On paper, they’re actually pretty solid, I still have my BBY card, and use it a few times a year when I need batteries, movies, or whatever. The problem is, the people in corporate can’t get it through their thick skulls that memberships and credit cards are only valuable as recurring revenue of the customers want to come back.
With the way the company is now, the majority of the stores are running on skeleton crews due to constant restructuring, and the employees aren’t rewarded for being good, knowledgeable salesmen, they’re only rewarded for memberships. This has lead to a degradation of customer service, employee morale, and overall quality of the store, which kinda renders the purpose of the memberships moot.
@@Ph03nix1 They aren't rewarded for memberships they avoid punishment when they get them.
@@thomgizziz depends on the store in that regard. Avoiding punishment is universal, but our store did have management that did care about us, so we got rewarded. Problem is, when the store management has corporate threatening their jobs at every turn, even the best managers can only do so much to shield the underlings from corporate. I survived three restructures, and the COVID layoffs that axed about a dozen managers in the four years I was there. Two were under Corrie Barry, and the other was the restructure that happened right as she was taking over from Hubert.
My mom just got me a pre-built from Best Buy. It took 2 weeks to get here and out of the box, it's really nice. I'll have to test it's overclocking and performance, but it has an i5-10400F, 16G of RAM, and a GTX 1660 Ti. Overall really good for under $1000
What if I told you I could have built you something far better with a monitor and all the peripherals included for less
@@gokublack8342 can u make a list?
@SilentFeelz I couldn't post the links here but provided you are able to build it and are willing to go AMD its not hard to get a better build for less Edit: I think the list I made for my friend came out just under 800 which included a better pc a monitor and peripherals minus a keyboard because its easy to get a keyboard if you're super budget focused. Literally any working keyboard can get you started
Not really. In the event that you use the warranty Best Buy usually just issues a store credit for the price you paid for the product. But there has to be something wrong with the product, and Best Buy will attempt to repair the product before they issue a store credit for a replacement
7:32 ah yes, the famous Vancouver F1 circuit, just a short drive away in Montreal 😂
I used to be a RadioShack store manager back in the 70's. There was no training for staff other than from the store managers who vetted and trained their staff. Back then from my experience the store managers were enthusiasts about electronics, audio or something along those lines.
“We’re not looking for the guy who wants to spend his entire paycheck on a sound system”, rather RadioShack sought customers "looking to save money by buying cheaper goods and improving them through modifications and accessorizing", making it common among "nerds" and "kids aiming to excel at their science fairs" - Charles Tandy CEO RadioShack - Died 1978.
I was one of those 70s kids that made what seemed like monthly trips to Radio Shack to buy small switches and boards to make simple circuits. I think my dad and I assembled most of the parts for a Vandergraff Generator from Radio Shack for a science fair.
I used to go to radio shack to get free batteries
Thank you! I loved going to Radio Shack back then for components, connectors and so on. I still have a little plastic pouch of pre-cut solder strips that I bought in '74 or so, among other treasures.
Radio shack was the best even in the 90s when I was growing up. Was sad to see it close down. But then again, I was sad to see blockbuster close down too
I miss Radio Shack.
While yes, that employee was a bit wrong in his approach of sale, but the reason he has recommended a much more expensive one is likely because employees have hourly goals of money that are sometimes very difficult to reach so we'll kinda throw it out there to see if it's a possibility, (not defending the rest of what he did)
As a former BestBuy employee that's been around to a toooon of different stores across the US, there are unfortunately a lot of employees in PCHO that know so little about computing(and just dont care to learn). Most of the training was computer based iirc, and occasionally we would have reps from companies like Intel,AMD, etc come to conduct mini training. That said, our store was pretty legit, but it all comes down to management. Job was super easy..just had to ask proper questions, listen to the customer and know your inventory and basics about computers.
When I was young I worked at Best Buy in the warehouse. I'd often give customers good advice and downsell them on things they didn't need to waste their money on, like $100 HDMI cables. As for the sales rep, none were techy or had any knowledge of what they were selling. Their focus was only meeting their unrealistic metrics of credit card sign-ups and warranties.
Honestly, the company is poorly run, treats their employees terrible, and hopefully goes out of business. Not to mention the experience for customers was terrible and has somehow gotten worse.
You don't need a dram cache for gaming, you don't need it for most things. And the things you do need it for, you'll probably know. The most average gamer will never need a dram cache.
there's nothing wrong with buying a prebuilt PC. You just gotta know what you're buying still. I usually recommend friends and family certain prebuilds that I research for them cause I'm not going to build one for them and I'm not going to help them warranty individual parts if anything goes wrong.
This! I am so done with friends/family wanting me to build them a PC then provide unlimited tech support.
I actually started recommending iPads/MacBooks for those who don’t want to play games.
Im too dumb to build one.i got confused when a friend explained the process. I ended up getting a laptop and quest two . They do everything i need with no lag so im satisfied
Even giving them recommendations for prebuilts will make you their future IT guy... it isn't a good idea unless you want to be their IT department.
@@5punkybob You feel that gets you away from being the IT guy? If they can't run a windows PC with out running into problems they aren't going to have a better time on an macos PC. You might get away with an ipad because it works like a phone but if they are screwing up on one PC they are screwing up on another and you have just bought into some stupid propaganda that a mac is magically going to be easier to use and have no problems which from experience is just not true.
@@thomgizziz I'd rather they come to me then go to my uncle who "knows a guy." My uncle literally purchased a laptop that had 2 gigs of ram and an intel e processor for 700 bucks. I was not impressed.
I also don't really expect store reps who are hired minimum wage and most likely are churned through a revolving door of turn over to give my relatives good advice.
It's not really their fault. That's just the nature of our society and it's complete ignorance. We expect these store reps making nothing to be experts but we don't want to treat them with respect or even give them the time to become the experts we want.
Was in Best Buy this holiday season. The comment about the sales staff wait is *very* true and its a bad sign that the company is in trouble. When I went in and needed some help checking something with their inventory they put me on a _waiting list_ on an in store app they used. The store (this was around the first week of Dec.) as far as I could tell, only had 2 to 3 people on the floor for THE WHOLE STORE. There was 1 in pick up order and 1-2 at the cashiers and the 2-3 walking the floor. When your staff are *that* low in the most busiest period of the year, that is *BAD* news.
That's what happens when the CFO gets the CEO position after the old one gets pushed out.
They found out they could run the store with half the people and still make 80 to 90% of the revenue that's a lot more profit
@gmu_alum08 as a publicly traded company what's most important profit
Only thing that fix is that is you know a decrease in profit likely due to unhappy customers or enough people complaining (you know not employees)
Former Geek Squad here, most computing department people tend to be absolutely clueless regarding the hardware they are selling. The amount of products they sold to people that just weren't up to task is wild, I often would cut in and guide customers myself. Too many times did I see sales reps pushing crappy $200 burst sku lenovo's with Athlon dual cores and a mechanical drive, in 2021 to people needing to do photoshop. Drove me nuts.
I can give you context to this. When 2020 hit Best Buy got a new CEO and she had initiated this idea that people should treat Best Buy like Costco. Having a membership and using price protection and return. It’s so bad that when I worked there, we got yelled at for not selling enough. In fact that’s the most important things to them. The way Best Buy operates as a whole is a systematic issue.
I worked there for 3 years and a bit, I always took pride in my product knowledge (learned from way before I got hired, from just learning and researching and building PC's on my own). Best buy does barely any knowledge training besides their online "quizzes" and most employees are just using knowledge they learn on their own.
I'm thankful I had good experiences working there due to the great management at my store and the staff standing up for you, and was able to give the unfiltered honest truth to the people I was helping. It's changed a lot since I left, and I heard for the worse with the new CEO taking over.
I’ve had my 2070 super and i79700f pre built for years from I buy power. It still can run the games that I like to play at max settings and can do some pretty great ray tracing. I have no regrets from buying it at Best Buy.
I worked at Best Buy in the USA in the late aughts
We were not commission, but told to push old inventory before new stuff the clear space so that we didn't have to "devo" old stock back to manufacturer
That sounds like a thing your store did and not a company policy... you clearly don't know the difference and don't have the ability to understand why your anecdote is probably terrible.
@@thomgizziz Every BBY in our region had the same policy, including the east coast flagship store I worked at. This was a policy handed down by the Regional Manager for Inventory Control
Tell me you know nothing about BBY ops, without saying you know nothing about BBY ops.
Yeah BB has gone downhill for sure. Bunch of people left after the pandemic on top of a lot of store closures and vastly reduced staff. Not to mention they hire seasonal people who know very little as well as people are no longer section specific. So people who use to know everything about TVs not not very the much about computers or anything else but only had to sell TVs now also have to sell all the other products in the store leading to people selling things they know nothing about. Needless to say it's a mess. I will say depending when you bought it they do have a pretty long return policy during the holidays so what he was saying about the coming back part is if the price reduces within the return exchange period you can post purchase price match unlike most places where you have to price match pre purchase. But besides that it's a mess and hard to get consistency these days. Worst of all is having people who have never dealt with mobile phones and accounts / plans are setting them up and selling them again with little to no knowledge which is a shit show as well
I work at BB right now and its rough, they kinda just send employees out to fend for themselves and we are constantly getting asked hundreds of questions. So it doesn't surprise me that an employee was redirecting or trying to push some quick alternative.
I work at Best Buy, and I'll tell you that you'll be hard pressed to find any 'experts' for sales. Sometimes you get lucky and find someone who actually knows their shit, but that's usually because they're an enthusiast, not because the store trained them. I work as a repair agent at the Geek Squad, so I typically avoid the sales floor as I'm not subjugated to outrageous sales goals. That said, even us Geek Squad agents aren't necessarily knowledgable either. It's sad, really.
why would anybody think someone getting paid $15/hr is going to be an expert? I think the general public are the idiots here
@@davidomar742 You'd be surprised how many people trust you because you're wearing a blue polo.
At Bestbuy I recently I bought the 13700kf and rtx 4080 rig by CyberPower Pc. I recently bought it for $2629, and am happy with the purchase so far. It really saved me time and labor to build it. I like prebuilts as long as the specs are in the ball park of what I need and the components together are msrp or lower.
Whoever was in charge of the close up b-roll for this video, chefs kiss. Fantastic quality
The good thing is Linus doesn’t have to worry about dropping any of the parts because it’s prebuilt
ouch
He'll just drop the whole PC.
I've worked at Best buy, what probably happened here is the guy you got probably didn't agree with The sales quota training that they currently got. End of year, you're going to get a lot of that. So he tried to get the customer to go somewhere else, knowing that he would have to push the old stock computers instead of sell the current ones.
I can't tell you how many times I ran into that. Even in geek squad and we didn't sell all that much.
Way back when I was at circuit City it was even worse, if we sold a model that was current, over one that was backstock, we would not get bonus'd on that sale. Always had to push old products first.
wait what do you mean, why would he push the old stock and what does that have anything to do with sales training ?
@@TheFalseShepphard because the older stock is taking up room that they need for the new stuff which means losing $$$ , the staff is encouraged to push the older stuff like in this scenario
It also depends on the store you work at. The store I work at has never pushed back stock or anything like that. Reading a lot of the comments on here talking about how terrible the experience has been for some people working there has made me realize how good the management at my store is lol
@@TheFalseShepphard like the other guy said, old products needs to move first. It would get bonused at my stores, maybe you would get a gift card to a local diner, maybe you would get and in store gift card. Whatever.
The point is though, you don't sell what the customer needs, you sell what your store needs to get out the door. I worked at two Best buys and three circuit cities, they all operated that way.
Some stores don't punish you for going outside of that sales training but others do. I've seen people lose hours, be threatened with termination, lose bonuses, all four not following company policy.
I picked up this pc at Best Buy on Cyber Monday for $699. It included a Asus TUF 23.8 monitor, glass side panel, mouse and keyboard. I think at that price was a great deal.
Coming from a Best Buy employee: I agree, the warranty pitches are stupid. The membership doesn’t work for all people and the company doesn’t realize you can pick that up through social cues and instead reccomends you shove it in their face three times before you stop trying. It’s the kinda thing that made me stop working on the sales side of the place.
All say is you don't know without trying and there's probably something that you can get that might Peak their interests since the plan is so wide I remember Jay's two cents ranting about the plan but has their reading through the benefits he's like oh this is actually pretty good if you shot the best buy.
That is your best buy, not all of them are ran by the same people. Corporate isn't pushing this 3 times nonsense that you are talking about.
@@profosist It is almost like almost nothing is universal but people seem to be coming to the conclusion that everything they think should is universal.
Not really sure I'd call this a failure. It's the holiday shopping season and inventories are low. The fact the salesman had to "go in the back and see what he could find" kind of supports that theory. She ended up with a computer that was built for the previous year's holiday season which you described as "adequate" and at a "lower price than she would have paid if she bought the same components and paid someone to put them together". Not bad for a last-minute holiday gift. Maybe give this another try after the holidays are behind us and stores have restocked their inventories.
keep in mind: Better PC, within budget, was sitting Right There on the shelf while they were talking.
Though you could have gotten a better option by walking around and looking at specs
omg i was so worried about the $1000 build i put together because thats a decent amount to me, but then linus's build was super similar to mine which gives me tons of confidence that i did a good job picking parts!
I've talked to a few Best Buy employees (as well as my share of Fry's Electronics employees back in the day) and I think the Best Buy reps only get paid or scored by the extended warranty that they sell. I think the Fry's folks were paid on commission for the whole sale price (assuming they could get you committed to the product in their area) so getting you maxed out for your budget was right in line with their compensation as opposed to the extended warranty push that BB forces
BB employee. We get paid hourly. The only commission from BB would be a $10 gift card for getting 4 memberships in a day which is not worth it. Some employees get money from brands themselves though which I do not know much about
@@joecool4656 you guys get commission from that ?? We only get ANYTHING extra for mobile activations.
My current manager used to be a manager at Best Buy. He said their hours were dependent on the amount of sales they made.
Asus warned me about that performance drop with my 13700K, so I do not think it matters that much.
That cpu just came out lol
@@mikeramos91 they are pointing out that Asus said that the 13700k would have a performance drop, even though I doubt it would
@@scott420 the pc in the video had an i5 11400f
@@mikeramos91 he means that performance drop is unlikely to happen on any decent cpu
@@Leooo969 because of the rgb? You will be fine as long u have a good cpu
Wow, your office is really nice for recording, but really adds a pretty significant amount of Echo.
Aura 'performance mode' can be turned off and it will still be RGB or Ambient Led lit...
Sort of a misread of the tech tip there.
i am not a big fan of Best Buy but the sell rep will not care what you buy, they don't have commission and they get paid maybe a little more minimum wage
The pre-built actually came in pretty good. The days of saving a ton of money by building your own PC are long behind us. There used a be a time when you could get a lot of components free after rebate. Unless you really want something specific or want to tinker, prebuilt computers are just fine nowadays. Loving my "gaming" laptop I bought 2 years ago for Walmart Black Friday. GTX 1650, Intel i5-9300H. I upgraded the ram and storage. Got me through the pandemic for $450. At that time, you could barely buy that GPU as a standalone card for that price, due to the shortage.
It's sad how many people don't know much about tech and get scammed by big brand name stores
honestly I think that Best Buy in this case did an excellent job, you are buying a prebuild that include labor, a share for the brand, a share for the shop and they give you an under 900$ machine that's need over 1000$ to be replicate... and it's plug&play.
Obviously if you buy everything by yourself, looking for best deal around in every single component from different shops, build everything by yourself (no labor) and completely skip in some cases the shop, the last ring of the selling chain, obviously you will save money but time and effort is not even comparable.
And to be honest, in few benchmark in this video we saw a 20 to 30% extra performance with.... 20% extra cost (even more considering is coming with m/k already).... I honestly think is a very good machine for the price
But if there is no clickbait how is linus going to sell his product effectively and hook people into watching his videos? Everybody has something to sell you and if you cant see and dont understand that then you are just waiting to be taken advantage of.
@@thomgizziz calm down.
I'd like to see this done again, but comparing buying a laptop instore (laptops have been far more popular than desktops for an extremely long time) vs. online retailers that actually let you customise a laptop (e.g. Framework, Lenovo, PC Specialist [UK] and so on).
It would be interesting to see how Best Buy would do if thrown into the Secret Shopper gauntlet.
Even more interesting would be Micro Center, a semi-regular sponsor (or at least used to be) and widely regarded as the gold standard for anything PC, especially since they sell pre-builts but can also build custom PCs.
Is it funny that someone had asked Linus when the next Secret Shopper will just TODAY on the WAN show. Lol. He said who knows it might be in the works already
Hello there, it would have been more fair to compare an $825 custom built to the Best Buy $825 price tag , with around a 20% gap between the 2 computers it is normal to expect better performance , also if you have vast knowledge on equipment and assembly and configuration you can expect a better custom built today than almost any brand of older (best buy was a 2021 computer) ready made computers.Still a good reporting of what you can expect from Best Buy but I think the same could be said for places like Walmart or Amazon and the like.Thank you and merry christmas.
Agreed!
Learning how to build PCs was the best thing I’ve done at home. It’s extremely overwhelming for a newcomer and I was literally sweating installing ram back like 4 years ago but I it’s so much easier now and it’s really fun
I'm literally sweating now, considering installing RAM for the first time. But i feel like the PC i got last week is the last time i'll ever buy a pre-build.
@@Sasquatch10 you can work on your prebuilt by upgrading it. Watch LTT how to build pc on TH-cam. Linus does a great job at explaining everything and it’s about an hour long but goes into everything
@@mkfmgaming3019 I'll check it out, that's basically what I'm looking to do. I bought the pre build last week and looking to upgrade the RAM on it.
In 2017, Bestbuy had the same system called the GL12CP for $700 CAD
It included:
i5-8400
x2 4gb 2666mhz
GTX 1050 2gb
The case was the older version of the one in this video, except it actually had vents on the bottom of the front plate instead of a smooth face.
I recently tossed a 1050 ti 4gb and two 8gb vengeance 3200mhz sticks in it although it can't overclock. Works for warzone
1050ti and 2 8gb Trident z RGB 6200 CL36 with i5-13600K. Yes I know how dumb it is but GPUs are expensive you know 😭
@@0xBlez no they are not. If you can afford a 300$ cpu and 200$ ram you can also afford a 6650xt or a 3060ti or whatever superior gpu.
@@0xBlez Just check the used card market dude. I just bought a 1060 3gb a couple weeks back for the equivalent of 50 USD and saw listings for 1080 for around 200 USD. But imo the 1060 alone is more than enough for 1080p gaming. It'll easily get stable 30+ fps in all games and hit 60+ in a lot of them. Unfortunately for me, my CPU is a FX 4300 so its a huge bottleneck. Hoping to upgrade it to a 8300 or 8350 soon or if I could get it for a low enough price along with the motherboard, an i7 3770k or 4770k.
3 years of IT at one company. I move. Bestbuy rejects my application. Wtf
They know you're overqualified lol.
they likely wanted sales experience over actual IT knowledge
Many years ago my brother got a job as a salesman at a Toyota dealership. One of the reasons they hired him was because he knew nothing more about cars than where to put the gas in.
Yeah because working at an IT company means you are qualified to sell things. I was also angry when I worked network security forensics and then tried to be a CIA agent and they wouldn't hire me...
What were you expecting? They know you won't stay long.
I work at best buy and one thing we do at my best buy is we push people away from Pre-builds, and we offer IF they get all the parts in store we will build it for them with total tech. Its a much better option then Pre-builds.
I have worked for Best Buy indirect and directly for the past 10 years. I can confidently say that the days of having employees be subject matter experts are pretty much gone. You will have one, maybe 2 employees in the stores that know a ton about computers, but generally speaking they either move to Geek Squad or they end up going to a department that will allow them to grow. Best Buy operates on what they call an ACD model: Advisor (general sales advice for every category in the store), consultant (2 levels of subject matter experts: senior consultant being the most highly trained), and designers (think system integrators or what used to be Magnolia system designers). Best Buy's operation model has changed from being a product and expert based company to being a service company that happens to sell products. For new hires, the main focus is ensuring they can offer the Total Tech yearly subscription and offer financial services through credit applications. There is no standardized training outside of electronic learnings on a computer that take about a week to complete, and the sales certification is entirely dependent on the store leaders saying they are ready to go.
If you end up going into a Best Buy, ask if they have a Senior Consultant available to speak to, or make an appointment via Best Buy's website at no cost. Not only will you have the ability to skip the line entirely, but typically speaking they will have significantly more knowledge and a more personalized experience for you. These are salary + commission sales people. While they do make money for what they sell it's not a ton. The most important metric they are held accountable to is repeat business from their clients, so you'll usually have a much better experience with them.
I have loved working for Best Buy over the years I've been there, and I think that the company overall is a great place for a kid to learn work as they are learning about sales, business, and other skills along the way. However if you're looking for subject matter experts, I can no longer recommend speaking to our stores reps. The company just doesn't seem to care about the training of the employees overall and it seems today they focus on doing more with less when it comes to labor and headcount.
My assumption on why they tried to send you to another store is that they could tell you weren't going to buy additional market basket items and didnt want thier numbers to look bad. I say as a former Staples employee. I know that selling the customer a computer from the website with no market basket wouldn't reflect poorly on the store so that is why they sometimes want to have you order something online.
What exactly is a market basket item?
@@___DRIP___ warranties and such.
@@___DRIP___ at staples anyway, basically anything that isn't a computer. Even stuff like pencils lol. Computers are basically sold at a loss in the hopes of making money on all the other stuff in the store.
I had an issue with BestBuy recently too, Normally when you return DOA parts its as easy as, "here is the dead one, gimmie a new one and I'll go." Unfortunately for me, they were a brand new employee and sent my bank a refund that wouldn't post till the next day and I hadn't gotten paid yet so I didn't have enough to buy a new one. They offered me NO solutions and the only reason I walked out with the part is because my friend loaned me enough to get it. I was pretty steamed that day because I explicitly told them I wanted to refund it for the same (working) part, and the fact that they wouldn't even work with me after they accidentally did the wrong thing just rubbed me the wrong way. This won't cause me to go elsewhere because in my experience it's few and far between but still an issue.
Never worked at bestbuy, but once a refund is done there’s nothing they can do. Inexperienced customer service, yeah. But there is no undo button. The word you meant to say was “exchange” not refund.
my current pc is a dell i picked up in march of 2018 from BB. it was the "best" they had in the store, because like your shopper, I 'needed it today". I can't remember what GPU it came with, but I had to replace the PSU in order to run the 1080ti I managed to barely overpay for on ebay.
cut to last night when the 3080ti I won on ebay was able to just be popped in.
Part of me wants to do a full monster custom build, but the sensible budgeted part of me will wait until the wheels fall off this one.
I have been testing the BB people at various locations I go to though. Most of their eyes glaze over when I start saying what I'm going to be doing with the machine, but I have had actually good convos with the select few that are actually passionate about computing.
I'd be interested to know how a custom build at the same price point as the prebuilt compared, even though $1000 was your budget you didn't spend it all when at best buy so you did technically save some money...
Former Best Buy employee here. Used to work in the computer department and sold plenty of gaming machines. Everything that was said about it taking a while for people to get help and the level of help pretty much adds up when it comes to the average customer. There are lots of reasons why, if you care to understand.
First, Best Buy corporate has been allotting far less positions than necessary for the past couple of years, hence the wait time. We understand that it's super frustrating to wait and we never want you to. The problem is that there are just not enough of us, ever. Especially during a rush and even more so during the holidays. You also have to factor in who comes into Best Buy: people who know next to nothing about the tech they are interested in. This is especially true of the computer department as unlike many other tech we sell, computers are ranked the highest in both need based purchases, meaning people need them, not simply wanting them, and those people often work in sectors where they are required to know little about the computers they must operate. All this adds up to the fact that we end spending an average of 20 minutes per customer interaction but it could take longer if they also require other accessories and software. These interactions are pretty much one on one so we get to you when we get to you. Nothing we can do about it. Trust me, we hate it when people take their time unintentionally causing other customers to wait. The funny thing is lots of customers walk out in rage because they claim to have waited 30 minutes for help when the store was only open for 10 (I'm not kidding, that happened so many times).
Second, inventory is always in a state of flux. You have to understand that Best Buy competes with online retail like Amazon, not other big box stores (at least when it comes to computers). This means that a lot of the time, most of our good stuff that's reasonably priced or otherwise on sale will be more often available online because warehouses have a lot less overhead than the store. What's the point of having a store then? So you can talk to one of us in case you have no idea what you should get. The point is to help you figure out what's best for you, not to simply walk out with something. That's what Walmart is for. It may end up being the case that the best deal for you may be one that must be ordered online. I can tell you for a fact that no worker cares how you buy your product more so than that you buy something and personally, I always urged the customer to go with the best deal. So what if you have to wait a few days, I would say it would be worth it if you get a much better bang for your buck or if you even save a couple hundred. Also, remember that if you want something NOW, odds are other people want it too. And if something is on sale or otherwise an amazing deal, that deal is going to be snatched up real quick. We generally tend to carry only a handful of gaming rigs in stock (with the exception of the holidays where we increase our holdings) because we're not a computer store, we're a general tech store. We have to have as much variety on hand as possible. Blame Amazon for creating an economic environment where the best way to compete is have more warehouse inventory than in store.
Third, yes, we do push the warranties hard. The reason for that is that there is virtually no margin on computer sales. If you want to have a viable in store experience, you have to expect that the margins will be made in this way. You have the right to say no and if the employee pushes too hard, that's wrong. Personally, I've worked with a ton of people who are clumsy, super worried, or otherwise unsure how to handle their computer long term. Those kinds of people are perfect candidates for the warranty plan because they will get good use out of it. On that note, the warranties do work. I've seen on countless occasions where we not only accepted warranty replacements NO QUESTIONS ASKED, we've even done so when they warranty wouldn't have covered it, just to be nice and give the best customer service possible. The amount of bending over backwards I've seen my managers do, especially in the face of rude customers who ended up getting exactly what the wanted is unbelievable. So sure, don't buy the warranty. As a tech channel, you guys aren't the right demographic and it wouldn't help you. But it isn't useless and the main goal is to keep customers satisfied so that they keep coming back. If they warranties burned bridges with our customer base, everyone would flee to Amazon and that's in no ones interest.
I understand that I have my biases and of course, every store can vary in level of customer service, but everything I said about corporate, staffing, and inventory is indisputable. It's not a perfect system but it's one that's built to deal with Amazon which sells a ton of crap at a loss. Best Buy is the only big tech chain to have survived to this point and it was these business decisions, for better or for worse, that have allowed it to do so. Shop wherever you like, there is always going to be a downside. Such is business and such is competition. You as the consumer only benefit from having multiple avenues to choose from.
P.S. I love you guys and your channel is super informative. Not saying this out of anger, simply looking to show you why these problems exist so you understand that they're not baseless.
Pre builts are a convenience.. hunting down sales for parts, inconvenience. It's also quite a bit to learn the knowledge required to know exactly what you are buying. Some people, myself included work long hours and have very limited time.
Many years ago I applied to work at Best Buy. I’m a PC enthusiast, I was going to college. They turned me down. The hiring manager told me I knew too much and wouldn’t be a good fit 😂
Knowing too much can be a legitimate thing especially if you're competing against other people that they feel are better suited for the job lots of sales people I've met that are really good aren't all that knowledgeable but dang can they sell
@@profosist sure, people who know little can sell products well. But in the case of Best Buy it is like the blind leading the blind and the customer will either be under delivered, overpay for a product, or get really bad software advice
@@classicrockonly right before the company unless there's an issue that makes them more money also it doesn't have to be blind because if you have someone who's good at selling you can make sure they have the correct info
@@profosist they may learn eventually sure. A good salesman will understand their products. I understood the products too much, and they said they didn’t want me because of that
It's true. It happened to me accidentally at BB. If you buy something on sale for say $1000 and return it after the sale ends, they will refund you the regular price, say $1100.
What? It’s the other way around. If you buy something NOT on sale and then goes on sale within 14 days (or just goes on a bigger discounted sale) they will refund the difference. Otherwise customers would just return the tv they have and buy an identical one on sale taking up more time and having to mark down the one they return as an open box.
No they will not lol They accept no-receipt returns where you are?
@@UranTCG His Best Buy likes to pay customers I guess. If that really happened, the supervisor that would’ve had to approve that is no longer working for Best Buy.
as a best buy employee, we do not have very good training, but thankfully my coworkers are very good at their job but it really depends on what best buy you go to. The Johnson City TN one is actually really good compared to other ones
As someone who worked at Bestbuy during the 'rona/gpu shortage, buying a prebuilt was your best move if you were looking to get a whole new pc and not just an upgrade. You would not only save money on the sum total of the parts, but you would get some consumer protections without even buying any extra warranties, not to mention the time and hassle of building a pc yourself. Now that things are getting back to normal you could save a few bucks building again, but even then if you're buying parts at msrp you are not saving any notable amount of money.
I bought a prebuilt last year in best buy online, Cyberpower brand and so far it seems great. I never built one from scratch so it was good enough for me.
Same. Mine is about 6 years old now and still works great.
Same here, the one I bought tended to overheat and get loud however so I just installed more fans on the top.
I used to work at best buy back in 2015/2016. Its was cool. Yeah its retail but wayy better than other retail places like target, walmart, office depot etc. It was a well respected place to work. It had a good trainings, employee discounts. But when I think it all went downhill when CEO Hubert Joley left best buy
still got my omen back in like 2016 or something and just upgraded the gpu, cpu & ram. that thing still runs everything i throw at it amazingly
Yeah,but you would have probably gotten more for less if u would have gone with a custom build.
Also, often, prebuilts are power limited like the last omen one so you are getting less performance for more money
WOW! My pc was a spare from my dads office runs pretty good after 4 years as it was never used still keeps up with HD 1080p streaming! I haven’t even changed any parts yet
Same bro. I have a 9010 optiplex with a 1650 in it and a new power supply and it runs just great. I doubled its RAM to max it out and it runs like a treat.
@@ztechrepairs same but I haven’t replaced any parts yet
@@ztechrepairs I’m gonna get two sticks of 32gb ramn soon tho
I got a laptop from bestbuy once - open box Alienware.
Never thought I’d actually pay the hefty cost for an alienware.
But… it was $1000 for perfect return condition (13700HX cpu , 4070 GPU, 1TB, 16GB DDR5 RAM, RGB keyboard)
I did have to do a factory reset and install all the drivers again.
Since I upgraded the memory and storage to be 64GB and 5TB - everything right under $1500 total.
I will state that the hardest stipulation on the list was the instock. Constant supply chain issues and very high demand have made it very difficult to keep more budget friendly gaming pc’s on store shelves, readily available.
Also, you did give two very big advantages to the custom built that easily allowed for it to be a better value. First was the aspect of being readily available. With building a PC, most people are going to need to order some part or another for the build. This luxury was not given to the store bought, as I’m sure that there were many better options that could have been available for order. The other aspect is the building of the unit. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean someone else can. A first time gaming PC buyer is probably not going to want to build their own.. or if they do it could take them days to do so. Even experienced builders, putting a PC together, installing the OS and drivers, and making sure that everything is 100% could be an all day affair. This is time and money the manufacturer spent to pre-build the PC. They could subtract $100 from the price and just send the parts, like how furniture manufacturers do now.
Today I enabled Smart Access Memory on my build thanks to you. I didn't know about it and I do feel silly now. Thanks Linus.
The Value Equation: What do you gain by paying more? And what do you lose by paying less? Don't be afraid to shop around and learn about the parts, especially the CPU. You don't have to build your own. But worth learning what is value in your area. Enjoyed this and good comparison review 👍
Last time I went to Best Buy is was devoid of any people, sales people included, I walked up to the front and asked if anybody actually works in the store, they just shrugged and said walk to the department you're browsing at and somebody will get to you. I never saw a single person thank God so I could look at new TV's without being bothered and found what I was looking for, played with it and then went home and bought it off of Amazon, got it the nest day free shipping.
I worked as a seasonal employee at Best Buy back in 2016. Although there was no commission, there were weekly/monthly sales goals. Our training consisted of "Always be upselling."
I got written up once because I didn't attempt to convince an elderly lady to buy a laptop that was x3 her budget.
Former best buy worker here, you are lucky these days to find a trained sales associate that knows about gaming, the days of super trained associates is over and the reason they told you to go to another store is bc half the time they are out of stock on gaming pc's in store, and the total tech warranty is all the stores care about on top of short staffed stores
Last time I bought a prebuilt PC was ‘95 from Office Depot. It was an awesome Pentium 150Mhz IBM Aptiva, lol.
I think my mom also had an Aptiva. It ran Worms 2 and Total Annihilation just fine, no complaints.
On another note I think you should have went to multiple Best Buy’s and compared the suggestions and customer service. Because it probably is hit or miss depending on where you’re at.
But that wouldn't make for good click bait. What you are failing to realize is that linus is selling you something as much as best buy is, probably even more, and his team knows how to sell a story to you and a story that says everything was great doesn't sell. You are literally telling him to do something that is bad for his business.
I had amazing service when I went to get a prebuilt and a monitor a few days ago. We weren't looking for a specific model but the worker there was extremely helpful!
i mean, mismatched sizes aside; at least it was dual channel RAM...