Speed, Convenience Lacking in Our 3-Store Best Buy Trek to Buy Lenovo Yoga C940 Laptop
Best Buy customers "want and deserve convenient, fast options to receive our great products, and they want it on their terms,” Chief Supply Chain Officer Rob Bass told last month's Best Buy Investor Update conference (see 1909250043). But speed and…
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convenience weren't the watchwords of our experience Saturday when we tried to get Best Buy to sell us Lenovo’s newly released $1,799 Yoga C940 2-in-1 Ultra HD laptop with Dolby Atmos surround audio and Dolby Vision HDR video. We finally landed a Yoga C940 via in-store pickup at Best Buy’s Union Square location in Manhattan, but not before trekking 30 miles over six hours by car and subway visiting three metro New York Best Buy stores to buy the product, twice leaving the stores empty-handed. Best Buy’s Westbury, Long Island, and Rego Park, Queens, locations each listed two units of the Yoga C940 in stock online and in the stores' inventory system when we arrived, but Blue Shirts and store managers in both locations couldn’t find the merchandise after many minutes searching haphazardly through bins, shelves and nooks. All staffers were apologetic, but were themselves befuddled why they were unable to find our unit when Best Buy’s real-time inventory system still showed two in stock. A manager in Rego Park even attempted to no avail to search the system to see if he could learn where one of the units in inventory had last been spotted. A Rego Park Blue Shirt took our payment for an in-store pickup at Union Square, advising us to go there because the system showed four units in stock there, versus only two at the Chelsea, Manhattan, location. When we arrived in Union Square about 90 minutes later, the pickup wasn’t ready. It took another 15-minute wait to leave the store with our purchase, but only after an astute attendant at the pickup counter intervened to prevent an order picker from giving us an “open box” sample of the Yoga C940 when we had paid full price for a factory-fresh unit. Best Buy's goal "is to make sure our customers have a great experience every time they enter our stores and we apologize it didn’t happen in this case," emailed spokesperson Jeff Shelman Monday. "We have made strides toward improving our customer service, but this experience clearly didn’t meet the expectations we set for ourselves.”