(Image lost in the Great Update of 2009)

As Rory Breaker, the villain of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels said, “If the milk turns sour, I ain’t the kind of [cat] to drink it.”

I saw over on SlickDeals that WalMart has a promotion running on PS3s that gives you a $100 gift certificate along with the purchase of a 40 GB PS3 at $399. Obviously, you can’t use the $100 on the PS3 itself, but so many peripherals are needed along with a system purchase that it might as well be $100 off. The posting on the deal said Best Buy was matching it, and I try to avoid WalMart on the weekend if I can avoid it (I’m not a huge fan of insane crowds).

Just to make sure, I called up the closest Best Buy, got a manager on the phone, and asked if they were honoring the $100 gift card deal. They were. In the 45 minutes it took me to drive down there, pick out a few peripherals ($80 for an HDMI cable, $60 on an extra controller, $60 each for two games, $25 each for two Blu-Ray movies, and $40 for the non-Blu-Ray-but-recently-released season 3 of Rescue Me), they received an email from corporate that WalMart was out of stock, so they no longer had to honor the deal. When I got to the checkout counter, he told me there was no way he could give me the $100 off coupon.

I reminded them that I’d just called less than an hour before, but the idiot manager said there was nothing he could do. He fed me some crap about a guy trying to buy six of them just a few minutes earlier, which really had nothing to do with the transaction I was trying to make. So I called his bluff: Match the deal or lose the sale. He didn’t bite, so I told him that was a terrible way to do business, slapped my $750 worth ($650 with $100 off) of merchandise down on the counter, and walked out of the store. On the way back to my car, I called my best friend–who’d worked at Best Buy for four years. He said that the store managers are practically omnipotent when it comes to honoring or not honoring specials, so the guy could’ve cut me some slack.

The crux of the matter here is that I don’t even really want a PS3. I know I’ll get one eventually just for the Blu-Ray player (to complement my 1080p TV), but I’m willing to wait until it’s a good buy. Today, for a short window, it was a good buy. The fact that I called in before going down there should’ve been enough to ensure me that deal. Any manager worth his salt would’ve taken a look at all the gear in my hands, done some basic math in his head, and come to the conclusion that this was a borderline case and the sales outweighed the lost dough on the gift card (not to mention all the future Blu-Ray sales that it might equate to). I don’t know what the margins are on those things, but I’d assume the total was more than $100 (I’ve heard anywhere from 10% to 30% margins for retail sales, but it’s especially high on things like peripherals and media sales). Instead of making a short-term profit on all the junk I was going to buy and creating a positive brand experience (”Hey, Best Buy is nice!”), the manager virtually ensured that I will NEVER buy that stuff from Best Buy and created a negative brand experience (”Even if you call in, you can’t trust what Best Buy says–they’re a bunch of lying crooks.”).

I’m not angry–just slightly annoyed that I wasted an hour driving down there and back for nothing.