Circuit City and Black Friday

Shopping for holiday bargains is getting so complicated that you might want to take your attorney and accountant along with you, just to make sure you understand the deal you’re getting. That would seem to be the moral of one reader’s tale about what happened when he tried to get an early jump on the day-after-Thanksgiving sales.

“Okay, it’s old news now, but I may as well pass it along anyway — then people can debate whether Circuit City was to blame or I was,” the reader wrote me a few days ago. “Like some other Black Friday shoppers, I kept track of the upcoming sales via the various websites for several weeks before Thanksgiving. I was in the market for a 24″ monitor so I was happy when I saw that one — the Samsung SyncMaster 245BW — was going to be on sale at Circuit City. But rather than stand outside in the cold all night waiting for the store to open, I decided to make a preemptive strike. I went a week before the sale and bought one at full price. But first I asked the sales rep what would happen if the unit went on sale in the next two weeks — would I be able to come back and get a price adjustment? He assured me I could.”

Being something of a skeptic, the reader then went over to the service desk and asked the clerk there the same question. Yes, indeed, he was told. “She told me that all I had to do was bring in the sales receipt and they would ring it out as a return and rering it at the sale price. I wouldn’t even need to bring it back with me.”

“As you can guess, when I showed up on Black Friday the service desk told me that they were not allowed to give any price adjustments on merchandise featured in their two-day ad or their early bird sale. ‘So I’m going to have to bring it back, return it, and rebuy it?’ I asked. The girl thought for a moment and said, ‘Yes, I guess you could do that.’ So the next afternoon I returned the monitor, and then told the girl at the service desk — not the same one as the day before — that I now wanted to buy it again. She looked puzzled and said, ‘I could have just given you a price adjustment.’ I told her about my experience the previous morning, and she immediately called a manager, told him about me and asked him if she could sell it to me.”

It was only at this point that the reader began to get a bit upset with the situaion. “Up until that moment, I was perfectly calm,” he wrote. “But now I was getting a little annoyed, so when the manager questioned me about whether a service counter rep had told me I could return it and rebuy it, I told him just how irritated I was since I had double-checked the policy before buying it the first time. He agreed to resell it to me but still felt the need to inform me that their policy actually forbids price adjustments on Black Friday/Saturday sale items. Fine. That’s their right. But I informed him that to exercise that right they have an obligation to first instruct their employees to inform customers of the policy during the weeks leading up to the sale since they are violating their own posted return policy.”

In the end, the reader got the product he wanted at the bargain price, but it was certainly at the cost of more effort than he or Circuit City would want. “So, yes, it turned out okay,” the reader writes. “But I don’t think I should have had to go through such hassle. Now, some might argue that I brought this on myself by buying the monitor in advance instead of standing in the cold all night. But I think Circuit City brought it on themselves by not making sure their staff knew about this change to their return policy in the weeks before Thanksgiving.”

The reader also wonders if Circuit City was possibly playing a bit of a game by letting their ad be leaked weeks in advance, or at least not fighting very hard to prevent it. “Note that the stores have the ability to keep their ads off the internet — you can see that OfficeMax kept their ad off the internet by having their lawyers send a letter to the websites. Circuit City could have done the same thing. But they didn’t, presumably because they wanted the extra publicity. For my part, I figured that by purchasing the monitor a week in advance, I gave the store plenty of time to replenish their stock before the big sale. I reasoned that if they were short on them, they would either get more in or not sell them prior to the sale so that they would have on hand the minimum quantity promised in the ad. The funny thing is, they still had five on the shelf when I returned and rebought mine.”

Was the reader’s difficulty all of his own making, or are Circuit City’s rules for its Black Friday sale too complicated for even its own employees to follow? And which retailer’s approach to the websites that leak the sale prices early do you favor – Circuit City’s apparent benign neglect or Office Max sending in the lawyers?

What do you think? Post your comments about this story below.